July 23, 2006
"Don't be small, Albert. Remember: you are a genius. So, so what if you masturbated this morning? This does not mean you are a bad scientist."
Some researchers at Cornell have devised a new light-scattering technique for rendering blond and brown hair in 3D computer graphics.
The problem is that light traveling through a mass of blond hair is not only reflected off the surfaces of the hairs, but passes through the hairs and emerges in a diffused form, from there to be reflected and transmitted some more.
The only method that can render this perfectly is "path-tracing," in which the computer works backward from each pixel of the image, calculating the path of each ray of light back to the original light source. Since this require hours of calculations, computer artists resort to approximations.
"People do something reasonable for one bounce and then assume it reflects diffusely," Marschner explained. In other words, he said, they assume that hair is opaque. "In light-colored hair it's important to keep track of the hair-to-hair scattering," he said.
Marschner and Moon's algorithm begins by tracing rays from the light source into the hair, using some approximations of the scattering and producing a map of where photons of light can be found throughout the volume of hair. Then it traces a ray from each pixel of the image to a point in the hair and looks at the map to decide how much light should be available there.
The result, in a test rendering of a swatch of blond hair, appears almost identical to a rendering by the laborious path-tracing method. Path tracing for the test required 60 hours of computation, while the new method took only 2.5 hours, the researchers report.
The Gusher: how high oil prices and the falling dollar interact
So, what we see above is that Americans continue to import more oil, at higher prices. Let's do a little basic micro economics here. If you raise prices and your customer buys more of your product, are you going to raise prices again?
Yeah, me too.
And this is part of why Bernanke's got a problem. Too much of all that money in the system is getting flushed into commodity speculation. It's dead easy money.
Bernanke needs to get people to stop buying so much oil. It's a weakness, a bull market that any idiot can exploit, and it's now becoming self-reinforcing as all bull markets (and bubbles) do at certain stages. The more money that is chasing a fixed number of barrels, the higher they get bid.
What is further clear from these charts is that Bernanke isn't tightening fast enough. He needs to stop pumping the gas pedal and slam on the brakes. The reason is that inflation is beginning to really hurt in the US, it's even getting to the point where so called core inflation (the inflation that measures, as Ritholz notes, what your life would be like if you didn't eat, have to pay a mortgage or property taxes, walked everywhere and didn't need to cool or heat your house) is beginning to show real inflation. Other measures of inflation have been overheated for some time now.
So the choice, as I noted before, remains the same. Slam on the braks and have a nasty recession - or ease the brakes on, have a nasty inflationary bout, and then have a nasty recession.
Scenario two will be chosen, because scenario one would lead to a Republican wipeout in November 2006.
Neuroscientists at Yale and Oxford have isolated the predecessor neurons that develop into the cerebral cortex in utero. Unfortunately, this interesting scientific observation will be exploited for political gain by the so-called "pro-life" crowd, no doubt. via
The findings published in Nature Neuroscience show that the first neurons, or "predecessors," as the researchers called them, are in place 31 days after fertilization. This is much earlier than previously thought and well before development of arms, legs or eyes.
Co-author Pasko Rakic, chair of the Department of Neurobiology and director of the Kavli Institute of Neuroscience at Yale, said the use of highly specific cell markers led the team to the surprising discovery of new types of neurons in the prospective cerebral cortex.
"We hypothesize that these predecessor neurons may be a transient population involved in determining the number of functional radial units including the human specific regions of the cerebral cortex mediating higher cognitive functions," Rakic said.
Until recently it was thought that cortical neurons were generated locally, but this research team describes a distinctive, widespread population of neurons situated beneath the surface of the human embryonic forebrain even before complete closure of the neural tube.
Predecessor cells, unlike mature nerve cells, do not have synaptic connection with other neurons. They do have long processes, or "tails," with one stretching out in front of the cell body and the other trailing behind. Analysis of the skeleton of these cells suggests that they migrate upwards in the surface of the developing brain and enter the future cortex.
As Billmon cogently explains, a regional conflict in the Middle East could easily lead to Iran cutting off the supply lines to coalition forces in Iraq, effectively losing an army. Mogadishu writ large. Academically, I've always felt that one of the dangers of invading Iraq was that it exposed and overextended the US military when it could be put to better uses, but it's only during this new crisis with Lebanon that the interrelatedness of all ME conflicts has really come to the fore for me. via
If the supply lines back to Kuwait were to be cut -- or even seriously interdicted -- the U.S. military presence in Iraq would quickly become untenable. I'm not even sure the Army could scrounge enough gas to keep the tanks and Humvees moving, given that Iraq already suffers from a severe refining capacity shortage and must import most of its gasoline from Kuwait.
In other words, in the event of a real world war -- as opposed to the kind that pundits pontificate about on Fox News -- Centcom would either have to "pacify" the transportation routes through southern Iraq quickly and ruthlessly (which might not be possible, given the troops available and the possibility some Iraqi units might turn on their putative allies) or try to evacuate some or most U.S. forces from Iraq, either by air or ground.
We're talking, on other words, about a potential debacle -- the worst U.S. military defeat since Pearl Harbor. Not because the Iranians are brilliant strategists or tough fighters (although they may be; we really don't know) but because the Iraq occupation has left the U.S. Army dangerously overextended, given its massive supply requirements.
Newly-released personal writings reveal what us Upright Citizens Brigade fans have known for years: Einstein was a horn-dog. Now, if only there's something in there about him traveling back in time to talk to Jesus, play cards with Jesus, shove Jesus! via
In 1919, Einstein divorced Mileva and married Elsa, but within four years he was in love with Bette Neumann, his secretary who was also the young niece of one of his friends. Many more liaisons followed.
The letters reveal that a beautiful Berlin socialite named Ethel Michanowski followed him to Oxford, only to discover that he was involved with a third woman.
According to excerpts of letters made available to reporters, Einstein discussed his extra-marital affairs openly with his family.
``It is true that M. followed me and her chasing after me is getting out of control," wrote Einstein to his stepdaughter in May 1931 of Michanowski's infatuation. ``I will tell her that she should vanish immediately. . . . Out of all the dames, I am in fact attached only to Mrs L. who is absolutely harmless and decent, and even with this there is no danger to the divine world order."
``I don't care what people are saying about me, but for mother and Mrs M. it is better that not every Tom, Dick and Harry gossip about it," he wrote.
``Mrs L." was Margarete Lenbach, another wealthy woman who used to send a chauffeur-driven car to collect Einstein for their late-night trysts.
But Einstein valued Michanowski's discretion, as he wrote to his second wife Elsa in 1931.
``Mrs. M. definitely acted according to the best Christian-Jewish ethics: 1) one should do what one enjoys and what won't harm anyone else; and 2) one should refrain from doing things one does not take delight in and which annoy another person. Because of 1) she came with me, and because of 2) she didn't tell you a word. Isn't that irreproachable?"
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 27, 2006
"I hope it feels so good to be right. There's nothing more exhilarating than pointing out the shortcomings of others, is there?"
A new scientific study provides evidence that the brain stores memories we cannot consciously recall: via
In the current study, Cabeza and his colleagues used a sophisticated imaging technique to detect brain activity in the medial temporal lobes (MTL) of test subjects exposed to "new" and "old" experiences. Located deep inside the brain, the MTL is known to play a role in a person's ability to determine whether something happened in the past.
The researchers first showed 16 study subjects a list of words. The subjects were then placed in a device called a magnetic resonance imaging scanner and shown another list of words, some of them "old" words previously viewed and others "new" words not previously viewed. The researchers observed brain activity, by measuring changes in blood flow picked up by the scanner, while participants looked at the words one at a time.
When subjects viewed an old word, they exhibited heightened activity in the rear portion of the MTL, whether or not they correctly stated that the word was old, Cabeza said. "This indicates that the brain has the correct answer even if we don't consciously think we've seen the word before," he said.
So why would a person make a mistake when asked about an event's oldness, if his or her brain holds the correct answer?
The researchers found that when a subject correctly reported seeing a "new" word, the scanner indicated that there was heightened activity mainly in a front portion of the MTL, rather than in the rear portion, as happens with old words. But when a subject mistakenly classified as new a word that was actually old, activity increased in both parts of the MTL, Cabeza said. This may lead the MTL to give mixed messages, resulting in an incorrect conscious response, he said.
Cannes adored Clerks II, according to Kevin Smith: via
When the flick ended and the credits started rolling, a standing ovation began that lasted a full eight minutes. It was surreal and wonderful, and it just kept going and going. I looked to Harvey (Weinstein, our boss), that old Cannes war-horse, to see if the cast and I should start heading out of the theater: as it was two in the morning and the applause wasn’t showing any signs of stopping. But from two aisles back, he responded with a waving “No” finger at me, mouthing the words “Don’t move.” So we all stayed put.
By the time the credits ended, I figured the audience was done applauding as well.
But they weren’t.
They just kept on clapping.
The other day Bush admitted "Bring 'em on!" was a mistake, without actually apologizing for it. He pulled out the classic "I'm sorry if you misinterpreted me" line.
On Thursday, Bush said the remark was "kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong message to people."
"I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner, you know. "Wanted, dead or alive"; that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted," he said.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:58 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 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 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 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
March 29, 2006
Red Flagged Links Vol. II 6/20/05-6/21/05
GUI for Snort network intrusion detection system [VersionTracker: Mac OS X]
Newsweek - No one challenged the bomber as he approached his target. Iraqi sentries waved him through the gate, into a high-security compound that protects some of the most vital government offices in Baghdad. His uniform and badge identified him as a member of the Wolf Brigade, the elite police unit he had joined three months before. [The Agonist]
The sun can be a harsh mistress, stealing our fluids and destroying our livelihood with her evil rays. But she can also make coffee for 10 people in 6 minutes. The KSol solar cooker, which looks like a cool radar dish, costs a little less than $200 and focuses the sun's rays onto foodstuffs for cooking and eventual human consumption. [Gizmodo]
According to an upcoming article in GQ, Saddam Hussein's life in prison is filled with zany antics, but also lots of heart. [Wonkette]
When MTV Networks’ new gay channel LOGO debuts this month, it will join a kicky set of companies whose trademarks—intentionally or not—are a little light in their serifs. [Boing Boing]
Starbucks mermaid: from dirty 15th C engraving to sanitized logo
Deadprogrammer sez, "An illustrated history of the Starbucks Siren logo, from the original 15th century engraving with naked chest, fat belly and spread tail-legs to the current sterilized "family friendly" version." [Boing Boing]
Screenwriter of cancelled, leaked Warren Ellis pilot marvels at his fanbase
Flynn sez, "The unaired pilot for the tv show 'Global Frequency' was leaked on the net. [Boing Boing]
Who Blew the Leads?Adam Zagorin | June 20TIME - The Saudis get blamed for not revealing more after 9/11. Maybe they said more than the FBI took in. [The Agonist]
Darknet: How an Intel VP broke federal law to talk to Congress
This excerpt deals with the presentation that Intel VP Donald Whiteside made to Congressional panels on the way in which copyright is limiting the technology industry, and how he had to break federal law to do normal, everyday things. [Boing Boing]
Prism 200 uses UWB to spy through walls
This device stands to be every 12-year-old kid's dream, 'cept it'll be wasted on high-level operatives. UK-based Cambridge Consultants look to release the Prism 200 early next year, a device that uses UWB-based through-wall radar technology to give 3D feedback on human movement and location through walls up to 40cm thick. [Engadget]
Enlist? Young Republicans Have Other Priorities
A full page ad in the Young Republicans National Convention 2005 program is one of the best media buys on the planet. [Wonkette]
Eyeballing the Buhriz Body Count
June 19, 2005 [Cryptome]
Applied Minds Think Remarkably
I filed a report for Wired News today on the goings-on inside R&D firm Applied Minds, founded by former Disney Imagineers Bran Ferren (at right in the snapshot I took below) and Danny Hillis (left). [Boing Boing]
At the story link, you'll find photographs of the high-tech robotic prostheses that this teen amputee uses for greater mobility. [Boing Boing]
Posted by Jon Rubin at 03:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 28, 2006
"It all started when a time travel experiment I was conducting went... a little ka-ka."
To create the neuro-chip, researchers squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size.
They used special proteins found in the brain to glue brain cells, called neurons, onto the chip. However, the proteins acted as more than just a simple adhesive.
"They also provided the link between ionic channels of the neurons and semiconductor material in a way that neural electrical signals could be passed to the silicon chip," said study team member Stefano Vassanelli from the University of Padua in Italy.
The proteins allowed the neuro-chip's electronic components and its living cells to communicate with each other. Electrical signals from neurons were recorded using the chip's transistors, while the chip's capacitors were used to stimulate the neurons.
Until now Apple's chief software engineer, Avie Tevanian is quitting. Avie was one of the creators of Mac OS X's Mach kernel when he was at Carnegie-Mellon, and moved to Apple from NeXT.
In an old Daring Fireball article, John Gruber explores the good and the bad of Tevanian. via
Tevanian’s legacy is marred, however, by Mac OS X’s usability flaws, most of which are attributable to Tevanian’s nearly unyielding obsession with promoting old Next technology over old Apple technology. His technical acumen may be undisputed, but neither is his tin ear for usability.
Meanwhile, MeFites craft conspiracies:
Macs move to Intel processors.
Vista gets "delayed".
Steve cashes in a bunch of stock.
Avie leaves.
So Steve sees the iPod and iTunes (and more largely iLife) as the future of Apple, knowing that Microsoft is the biggest potential competitor. Steve cedes his OS to MS, in return allowing him to position Apple as the provider to MS of all the cool iLife-ian software and services (music store) that'll run on the new kick-assy OS that is VistaX. Apple folds the bulk of the hardware production to a third party, continues to print money with shipping crates full of iPods, and Bill gets even richer peddling the new uber-OS.
Hey, stranger things have happened...
posted by jalexei at 2:31 PM EST on March 28 [!]
In other "pursue other interests / spend more time with the family" news, Andy Card is resigning his position as White House Chief-of-Staff. Card's been Bush's CoS for, like, ever. He was the guy with Bush in Sarasota on 9/11, whispering in Bush's ear as the latter continued to read My Pet Goat. Innocuously quiet and reserved, Card wears the guise of a moderate. It's easy to forget that the man was in charge of the White House Iraq Group, the propaganda organ tasked with deceiving the public and Congress into supporting the war. It was in this role that he made what is, perhaps, his most famous statement. Asked why Bush and Rumsfeld had denied war plans all summer, in September 2002 Card explained:
From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.
Card is also bound up in the Plame investigation. When the Department of Justice announced its probe into the matter, the first person informed was the at-the-time White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. Gonzales, in turn, got Justice to let him delay officially notifying the White House staff until the next day. During this 12 hour gap, however, Gonzales surreptitiously informed Andrew Card of the imminent investigation. This gave the White House a full half a day in which to shred documents and delete emails, technically evading obstruction of justice charges.
SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you the obvious question, Mr. Attorney General. Did you tell anybody at the White House, get ready for this, here it comes?
GONZALES: I, I told one person, ah, in, in the White House of, of the notification, and, and —
SCHIEFFER: Who?
GONZALES: and immediately — ah, I told the chief of staff. And immediately the next morning, I told the President and, shortly thereafter, there was a notification sent out to all the members of the White House staff.
Speaking of Plame, is Karl Rove helping Fitzgerald pin obstruction charges on the Vice President's office? via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 03:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 26, 2006
"Jane first found herself between the stars , her thoughts playing among the vibrations of the philotic strands of the ansible net."
I forgot to note it yesterday, but Saturday saw the 250th post to ubiquit.us blog. To commemorate this non-event, and because Ash was sitting around feeling extremely helpful: stylesheet improvements! "Via" links are now automagically surrounded by brackets and placed closer to the items to which they refer. The first blockquote in a row will have a solid line, and consequent ones will have dotted lines, and all of those lines span less of the page.
Since Mozilla is not CSS2-compliant and they have no intentions of becoming so anytime soon, this site currently does not look its best in Firefox or any other browser based on the Gecko engine. However, it is extremely purty in Safari, and, I assume, Opera. Don't even ask me about Internet Explorer.
The AP story has a gruesome laundry list of other seemingly unrelated violence throughout Iraq, including a 13-year-old killed in Basra; 13 hand-cuffed and "bullet-riddled" bodies discovered in two cities; a bomb exploding in central Baghdad that killed one and wounded three; a drive-by killing of three teenagers in Baghdad; a security guard for the Iraqi finance minister killed; a policeman and cousin killed near Baquoba; a farmer killed in Buhriz; and security guards and a policeman wounded on their way to work.
The Movie Timeline is a history of humankind, as surmised from Hollywood movies. For example, in 1999... via
Neo fights agents controlling the Matrix (The Matrix)
Robot teachers are placed in schools with unruly students (Class of 1999)
A basketball coach benches his undefeated team due to their collective poor academic record (Coach Carter)
Tyler Durden and Project Mayhem blow up the HQs of the world's largest credit companies (Fight Club)
Discovering his wife is a fembot, Austin Powers follows Dr Evil to 1969 and returns with Felicity Shagwell (Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me)
The Killaks turn the Earth's monsters against mankind, but are foiled by Moonlight SY3 (Destroy All Monsters)
August: An artificial shield protects the earth as the ozone layer disintegrates, causing permanent night (Highlander)
October 10: Aurora Borealis causes John Sullivan to talk to his father Frank in 1969 via a ham radio (Frequency)
December 31: Lenny Nero has a tough Millennium Eve, thanks to a snuff tape (Strange Days)
December 31: The Devil in human form searches for his bride and tries to end the world before 11pm (End of Days)
December 31: Hong Kong - Virginia Baker and Robert MacDougal steal $8 billion thanks to the Millenium Bug (Entrapment)
Straight out of Speaker for the Dead, subvocalization technology from NASA.
Government claims right to introduce evidence seized in warrantless searches into court proceedings, spy on lawyers and clients, and doctors and patients.
"Because collecting foreign intelligence information without a warrant does not violate the Fourth Amendment and because the Terrorist Surveillance Program is lawful, there appears to be no legal barrier against introducing this evidence in a criminal prosecution," the department said in responses to questions from lawmakers released Friday evening.
"Although the program does not specifically target the communications of attorneys or physicians, calls involving such persons would not be categorically excluded from interception," the department said.
The city health code, which governs the way chefs cook, does not specifically address the way a restaurant should vacuum-pack food. While no health problem has ever been tied to sous vide in restaurant kitchens in New York, officials say they are concerned that food could breed botulism and listeria if it is vacuum-wrapped improperly.
How-to: win with nontransitive dice via
Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:52:58 +0000 (Wed, 18:52 CST)
Jerry A. Taylor submitted the following Information:
Email xxxxxxx
Company City of Tuttle
Location Oklahoma
Comments
Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???
Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!!
I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma.
Could post more, but I've got a paper to write..
Posted by Jon Rubin at 07:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 25, 2006
~Platforms have been erected. Effigies built. Slogans coined. Songs have been written. Rumors have been circulated. Autographs faked.~
I've got a paper to write and need all my RAM, so here's a link dump.
I know this is a ridiculously paranoid thing to say, but does anyone else have any doubts about these newly-declassified Iraqi documents from before the war, that the Pentagon's been releasing day by day? Let me phrase it another way. Imagine you were in the the Executive branch, and you'd already decided you can cherrypick which laws to obey and that you have the authority to ignore the Bill of Rights. Your boss's approval ratings are at record lows. You've already taken a hybrid military/civilian intelligence agency that's supposed to be for foreign surveillance and aimed it domestically, effectively violating Posse Comitatus. Your Defense Department is just itching to use the domestic media in Psy-Ops campaigns. You proudly declare that reality is decided by consensus, not facts. Is it that much of a stretch, at this point, to start forging documents to show a link between Saddam and Osama?
Maybe I just have trouble getting my news from a .mil domain.
Anyway, let's take these docs as the truth. They still show nothing we didn't already know. Saddam and Osama held talks in the 90s. By 2002, though, they weren't talking to each other and Saddam was doing his best to capture al-Zarqawi. The only interesting thing in the most recent batch is that Russia has intelligence sources in our CENTCOM.
Solve Sudoku with a simple C program.
dKos: Safeguarding the Smoking Gun?
Earlier this month, Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor, attorneys in Washington, D.C., sued the federal government in what was the latest of a series of lawsuits based on illegal domestic spying. Belew and Ghafoor represented Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, an Islamic charity which was indicted for allegedly funneling money to terrorists. The charges were eventually dropped.
In May 2004, the government had accidentally provided these lawyers with documents that included transcripts/summaries of conversations between Belew and Ghafoor, the attorneys, and their client, Suliman al-Buthe, who was the director of the charity. The documents, marked "Top Secret" were then passed on to David B. Ottaway, a reporter for The Washington Post. When it found out it let this "national security document" slip through its fingers, the FBI demanded it back. Ottaway gave it back to the FBI.
The lawyers contend that those transcripts are evidence that they were victims of the President's illegal domestic spying program. It is highly unlikely a judge--even a FISA court judge--would allow the government to violate the attorney-client confidentiality and wiretap an attorney's phones.
The case is being tried in Portland, Oregon, where the charity is based. I mentioned earlier that the Belew and Ghafoor are in possession of some explosive documents which they claim detail the process of how the government conducted illegal spying on American citizens. Understandably, such documents were immediately put under seal. A newspaper in Oregon filed a few days ago to have those documents unsealed in the public interest. If these documents are what the lawyers say they are, they are the only public evidence of extrajudicial NSA spying conducted under Bush's order. In fact, these mystery documents are so sensitive, the judge in the case had trouble deciding just where to store them.
How-to: master wget via
How-to: use wget to keep up with mp3 blogs via
New North American internet backbone map via
Their experiment involves a ring of superconducting material rotating up to 6 500 times a minute. Superconductors are special materials that lose all electrical resistance at a certain temperature. Spinning superconductors produce a weak magnetic field, the so-called London moment. The new experiment tests a conjecture by Tajmar and de Matos that explains the difference between high-precision mass measurements of Cooper-pairs (the current carriers in superconductors) and their prediction via quantum theory. They have discovered that this anomaly could be explained by the appearance of a gravitomagnetic field in the spinning superconductor (This effect has been named the Gravitomagnetic London Moment by analogy with its magnetic counterpart).
Small acceleration sensors placed at different locations close to the spinning superconductor, which has to be accelerated for the effect to be noticeable, recorded an acceleration field outside the superconductor that appears to be produced by gravitomagnetism. "This experiment is the gravitational analogue of Faraday's electromagnetic induction experiment in 1831."
It demonstrates that a superconductive gyroscope is capable of generating a powerful gravitomagnetic field, and is therefore the gravitational counterpart of the magnetic coil. Depending on further confirmation, this effect could form the basis for a new technological domain, which would have numerous applications in space and other high-tech sectors" says de Matos. Although just 100 millionths of the acceleration due to the Earth's gravitational field, the measured field is a surprising one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein's General Relativity predicts. Initially, the researchers were reluctant to believe their own results.
They took their inspiration from superconductivity. The electromagnetic properties of superconductors are explained in quantum theory by assuming that force-carrying particles, known as photons, gain mass. By allowing force-carrying gravitational particles, known as the gravitons, to become heavier, they found that the unexpectedly large gravitomagnetic force could be modelled.
Intellectual poverty is the most striking quality of the Bush administration's new National Security Strategy statement, issued on Thursday. Its overall incoherence, its clichés and stereotyped phraseology give the impression that Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and his fellow authors assembled it from the boilerplate of bureaucratic discourse with contempt for the Congress to whom it is primarily addressed.
That low thrumming noise is Maxwell Taylor spinning in his grave.
In the aftermath of the Vietnam war Max Taylor and a group of folks in the highest echelons of command restructured the American Army such that it would be impossible to have a major war, contrary to what happened in Vietnam, without mobilizing the National Guard. The thinking was that this would increase the political stakes of going to war and ensure that future administrations couldn't slide the country into war without anyone noticing, using only the regular Army. I don't know why this hasn't worked - I'm guessing that it has to do with the fact that the Army cross-cuts class dynamics less than it used to.
Adjusting curves tutorial via
I can identify with this comment:
I use browsers pretty heavily. If I just used one, It would crash every few days. So I rotate between primarily using Safari & Camino, occasionally using Shiira. That way I can quit one of them every few days, keeping the memory consumption down (All browsers swallow memory if you use them enough). At any one time I'll have two browsers open: one primary that I try to open new tabs and windows in, and a secondary that I'm trying to close tabs and windows in. When the secondary browser has nothing open in it, I'll restart it and switch to using it as my primary browser.
I use Firefox on OS X maybe once every few months, tops. Every time I try to use it It crashes under %10 of the workload that it takes to crash either Camino or Safari. It's quite the stinker on OS X.
posted by blasdelf at 10:21 PM EST on March 24 [!]
High-quality video of the New Super Mario Bros. running on a Nintendo DS Lite at the GDC. via
Daring Fireball examines the iPod juggernaut:
In short, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, Apple’s iPod competitors are totally fucked.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 21, 2006
"An arm passed through a hole made by a blow from a fist, through the grating and the glass. The arm seized a loaf of bread and carried it off."
On an almost daily basis, I find myself wondering why asymmetric key cryptography is not used in more places. This powerful and mature technology is the perfect solution to numerous problems of information sharing and identify verification which face commerce, communication, and many other aspects of human life. But it has yet to find its way into common use outside of tools targeted at highly technical users - with the one very notable exception of SSL encryption used for secure web browsing.
Zbigniew Brzezinski burns Rumsfeld: via
"Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis," Rumsfeld wrote in an opinion piece published Sunday -- the third anniversary of the beginning of the U.S.-led war in Iraq -- in the Washington Post...
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser under President Carter, a Democrat, was less charitable.
"That is really absolutely crazy to anyone who knows history," he said. "There was no alternative to our presence. The Germans were totally crushed. For Secretary Rumsfeld to be talking this way suggests either he doesn't know history or he's simply demagoguing."
"Paleo-nerd memorabilia," [video.google] as Cory Doctorow puts it.
In-depth discussion of le problème du pain: why does bread taste better in France / the EU? One comment seems to verify Asher's theory that the best bakeries are German. via
A little piece of unverified information I heard is that most French boulangeries don't make their own bread, but instead just bake factory-made loaves, and ironically most of these factories are located in Germany...
Less formally, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, asked about “permanent duty stations” by a Marine during an Iraq visit in December, allowed that it was “an interesting question.” He said it would have to be raised by the incoming Baghdad government, if “they have an interest in our assisting them for some period over time.”
In Washington, Iraq scholar Phebe Marr finds the language intriguing. “If they aren’t planning for bases, they ought to say so,” she said. “I would expect to hear ’No bases.”’
Right now what is heard is the pouring of concrete.
In 2005-06, Washington has authorized or proposed almost $1 billion for U.S. military construction in Iraq, as American forces consolidate at Balad, known as Anaconda, and a handful of other installations, big bases under the old regime.
LED-FLEX is a string of LED lights encased in a plastic tube. It looks like a neon light, but you can bend it, or even tie it in a knot! via
How-to: make a lightbulb in 30 minutes, by Theodore Gray, one of the co-founders of Wolfram Research. via
For a filament, I used a thick tungsten wire I had lying around the shop and, for the power supply, a small stick welder I got at an auction. It supplied about 50 amps at 30 volts, giving me a 1,500-watt bulb. When I powered up the filament without the bucket in place, it produced a prodigious quantity of tungsten-oxide smoke and didn't last very long. But with the bucket on and a steady flow of helium, the filament glowed brightly and cleanly.
Did the "Church" of Scientology force a stroke-debillitated Isaac Hayes to quit South Park? via
Isaac Hayes did not quit "South Park." My sources say that someone quit it for him.
I can tell you that Hayes is in no position to have quit anything. Contrary to news reports, the great writer, singer and musician suffered a stroke on Jan. 17. At the time it was said that he was hospitalized and suffering from exhaustion.
It’s also absolutely ridiculous to think that Hayes, who loved playing Chef on "South Park," would suddenly turn against the show because they were poking fun at Scientology.
Oops. Billy West retracts announcement of new Futurama season. via
Guys,
I'm sorry I gave inaccurate info on the cartoon.I was told on one end that the
TV show was a go but DXC enlightened me (with a hammer) that this was
not the case.I think there is a Futurama project as in DVD's but I appearently
had bad info.
OpenZaurus 3.5.4 released via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 01:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 18, 2006
"Yeah, and what happens is everything is sucked into it. Even light. That's why we can't see it. Just gets...sucked in." "Thank you." "Sure."
- The writer of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman, once wrote a pilot for a sit-com called Depressed Roomies. via
ROD
Let me tell you boys where I earned this "clomping" leg. A little place called Nam. Defending you sons of bitches and your right to be hippie draft dodgers and attend Kent State. Now you want to selfishly deny me my only remaining pleasure of ...(at a loss) noisily limping back and forth above people's heads? Shame on you!ALAN AND ARTHUR ARE SILENT, SHAMED. FINALLY:
ARTHUR
Aren't you a little young to have been in Vietnam, Rod?ROD
(nervously) Did I say Vietnam? I meant ... Korea?
I do know (and TX-28 was an example of this) that there isn't that much of intensity on our side either. They're discouraged because Republicans are fucking everything up and have trule abandoned just about every "conservative" principle in the pursuit of power and greed.
But our side is discouraged because Democrats aren't doing anything about it.
At this point, I suspect we won't make the predicted gains because most people feel helpless about the political situation in DC.
What every Democratic challenger should do at this point is run against DC. Not just against Republicans, but against the entire frickin' town. It's a mess. It's a disaster. Run against it. Run against Pelosi. Run against Frist. Run against DeLay. Run against Biden. Run against the Democratic consultants. Run against the whole lot of them.
- "Since" is an ancient word, and is inexorably bound up in in the notion of time, going back to Proto Indo-European.
- The BlackStar is a classified government mothership/"spaceplane" that can launch smaller surveillance vehicles at high altitudes. via
Now AWST isn't the Inquirer. On the contrary, it's published by McGraw-Hill and its usual readers are people in the industry or the government. But if this piece, by William B. Scott, a senior editor of the journal, is to be believed, a two stage-to-orbit space plane was developed in the 1980s and may have become operational in the 1990s only to be cancelled recently.
As the piece details, the program was built in response to the loss of the Challenger and subsequent military concern about access to space. During an ultra-secret crash development program, the SR-3, a mothership based on the XB-70 Valkyrie bomber and the XOV, a low-Earth orbiter derived from the X-20A Dynasoar were developed.
Collectively, the articles contain many examples of internal inconsistencies, such as the airbreathing aerospike engines and the spaceplane that blocks the landing gear of its carrier aircraft. But the articles also include claims that are externally illogical—that is, they make no sense compared to what we know about the world.
For instance, take this statement: “Overall, a two-stage-to-orbit system wouldn’t have been technologically difficult to develop, according to aerospace veterans.”
This of course raises an obvious question—if it was so easy to do, why hasn’t NASA or the Air Force done it? Why are we still stuck with expensive space shuttles and expensive Atlas and Delta rockets? Even small rockets like the Pegasus are relatively expensive, and in fact the very existence of small rockets undercuts the justification for Blackstar’s use as a satellite launcher. If Blackstar existed, why do we have the Pegasus and Minotaur small launch vehicles? Why has DARPA sponsored the FALCON rocket program? Why did NASA and the Air Force dabble in the X-43A hypersonic vehicle if an operational hypersonic spaceplane already existed?
- For all mainstream media organs like the Washington Post are constantly accused of being "liberal," the press always seem to be at the ready when the government needs an accomplice to help lie the nation into war. via
1. Monday, Bush claims Tehran is behind the IEDs:
"Some of the most powerful IEDs we're seeing in Iraq today includes components that came from Iran. Our Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, told the Congress, 'Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devises' in Iraq."
2. Tuesday, General Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs, says there is no proof Tehran is behind any of this:
The top U.S. military officer said on Tuesday the United States does not have proof that Iran's government is responsible for Iranians smuggling weapons and military personnel into Iraq.
"President George W. Bush said on Monday components from Iran were being used in powerful roadside bombs used in Iraq, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week that Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel had been inside Iraq.
Asked whether the United States has proof that Iran's government was behind these developments, Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon briefing, 'I do not, sir.'"
3. Saturday, the Washington Post publishes already-debunked Bush talking points, but now AS UNREBUTTABLE FACT.
- Making Your Terminal into a Desktop is a nice little tutorial on living at the command-line, which will expose you to the wonders of screen. via
- DNS DDoS (That either made sense to you or it didn't. Consider it an acronymical test of geekitude.)
- DNA stapling permits novel nanostructures: via
Rothemund's trick is this: Instead of custom-designing small snippets of DNA so that they fit together in a certain way, he borrows a single, long strand of DNA from a harmless virus.
"We take that very long strand of DNA -- it's about 7,000 letters long -- and we add to it about 200 short DNA strands that I call staples," Rothemund says.
The staples bring two distant parts of the DNA strand together so that it folds.
"We actually fold the DNA into any shape that we want," Rothemund says. "So in the case of the smiley faces that I made, I actually fold the DNA into a disk, but then leave two holes for the eyes and the mouth."
Rothemund has developed a computer program that can analyze a shape, figure out the right folding pattern, and then tell you what DNA staples you need to make that shape.
"It's really easy and fun, actually, to make whatever you want at the nano-scale. You design it in the computer, you order the DNA sequences, they come in the mail, you add a little bit of salt water, you heat it up and cool it down, and then an hour and a half later, it's ready to look at under the microscope."
- Some physicists claim black holes do not exist, because dark energy will balance out the extreme gravity of a collapsing star, stopping it from folding into a singularity. Instead, they should be called (depending on the research team) "dark energy stars" or "gravastars."
- The 1000 works most commonly owned by libraries in 2005. Number 1? The Bible. Number 1001? Eusebius. A collection of Far Side comics comes in at #115, just under the World Book Encyclopedia and just above the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. via
- Ripped straight from Fark:
Asinine: Fifty-seven per cent of American drivers say they have "personal reasons" for not using their turn signals, including a breathtaking seven per cent who say not using them "adds excitement" to driving.
The real fear is the mentality of so many people lately- the rift that seems to have worked it’s way through the very heart of the country, dividing people. It’s disheartening to talk to acquaintances- sophisticated, civilized people- and hear how Sunnis are like this, and Shia are like that… To watch people pick up their things to move to “Sunni neighborhoods” or “Shia neighborhoods”. How did this happen?
I read constantly analyses mostly written by foreigners or Iraqis who’ve been abroad for decades talking about how there was always a divide between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq (which, ironically, only becomes apparent when you're not actually living amongst Iraqis they claim)… but how under a dictator, nobody saw it or nobody wanted to see it. That is simply not true- if there was a divide, it was between the fanatics on both ends. The extreme Shia and extreme Sunnis. Most people simply didn’t go around making friends or socializing with neighbors based on their sect. People didn't care- you could ask that question, but everyone would look at you like you were silly and rude.
I remember as a child, during a visit, I was playing outside with one of the neighbors children. Amal was exactly my age- we were even born in the same month, only three days apart. We were laughing at a silly joke and suddenly she turned and asked coyly, “Are you Sanafir or Shanakil?” I stood there, puzzled. ‘Sanafir’ is the Arabic word for “Smurfs” and ‘Shanakil” is the Arabic word for “Snorks”. I didn’t understand why she was asking me if I was a Smurf or a Snork. Apparently, it was an indirect way to ask whether I was Sunni (Sanafir) or Shia (Shanakil).
“What???” I asked, half smiling. She laughed and asked me whether I prayed with my hands to my sides or folded against my stomach. I shrugged, not very interested and a little bit ashamed to admit that I still didn’t really know how to pray properly, at the tender age of 10.
Later that evening, I sat at my aunt’s house and remember to ask my mother whether we were Smurfs or Snorks. She gave me the same blank look I had given Amal. “Mama- do we pray like THIS or like THIS?!” I got up and did both prayer positions. My mother’s eyes cleared and she shook her head and rolled her eyes at my aunt, “Why are you asking? Who wants to know?” I explained how Amal, our Shanakil neighbor, had asked me earlier that day. “Well tell Amal we’re not Shanakil and we’re not Sanafir- we’re Muslims- there’s no difference.”
It was years later before I learned that half the family were Sanafir, and the other half were Shanakil, but nobody cared. We didn’t sit around during family reunions or family dinners and argue Sunni Islam or Shia Islam. The family didn’t care about how this cousin prayed with his hands at his side and that one prayed with her hands folded across her stomach. Many Iraqis of my generation have that attitude. We were brought up to believe that people who discriminated in any way- positively or negatively- based on sect or ethnicity were backward, uneducated and uncivilized.
The thing most worrisome about the situation now, is that discrimination based on sect has become so commonplace. For the average educated Iraqi in Baghdad, there is still scorn for all the Sunni/Shia talk. Sadly though, people are being pushed into claiming to be this or that because political parties are promoting it with every speech and every newspaper- the whole ‘us’ / ‘them’. We read constantly about how ‘We Sunnis should unite with our Shia brothers…’ or how ‘We Shia should forgive our Sunni brothers…’ (note how us Sunni and Shia sisters don’t really fit into either equation at this point). Politicians and religious figures seem to forget at the end of the day that we’re all simply Iraqis.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 03:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 17, 2006
"Why does a Moon rock taste better than an Earth rock?" "Because it's a little meteor."
- That tutorial I linked to last month, about making fake miniature model pictures in PhotoShop? Someone's made a whole fake tilt shift photography video. It looks instupituously real. Err. Unreal, I guess. via
- Do you know what a Kleene star is? You probably do and don't know it. It's the wildcard mask. If you've ever used an asterisk in grep, well, that's a Kleene star. It represents one or more occurrences of a character in a string. It's named after Stephen Kleene, who created and coined regular expressions in the 1950s. Kleene, by the way, is pronounced "Klay-nay."
His son, Ken Kleene <kenneth.kleene@umb.edu>, wrote: "As far as I am aware this pronunciation is incorrect in all known languages. I believe that this novel pronunciation was invented by my father."
- In the "first of thousands" of Hussein-era Iraqi government documents "expected to be declassified over the next several months," we learn that Saddam had an APB out to capture al-Zarqawi and was still trying to figure out whether or not mujahedeen had travelled through Iraq on their way to fight the US in Afghanistan. via
Government sources tell NBC News that federal investigators recently were able to carry materials needed to make a similar homemade bomb through security screening at 21 airports.
In all 21 airports tested, no machine, no swab, no screener anywhere stopped the bomb materials from getting through. Even when investigators deliberately triggered extra screening of bags, no one discovered the materials.
- Peggy Noonan and the long con: via
Now Peggy Noonan and the rest of the plastic Republican chattering teeth did not think back in 2000 that Bush's "compassionate conservatism" meant that he was a spender, they thought it meant that he was a liar--and that they were in on the con. The Bush budget strategy, they thought at the time, had four components:
1. Highball estimates of future budget surpluses in order to make it look like there's more room for tax cuts than there was.
2. Lowball the costs of the tax cuts by telling people that the AMT will be repealed when you calculate the magnitude of their tax cut and yet keeping the AMT in effect when calculating the revenue cost of the tax cut.
3. Call yourself a "compassionate conservative" to convince voters you don't want to make elderly emphysema patients front the money for their oxygen cylinders.
4. Then, when deficits reemerge, say: "Oh. What a surprise. We have to cut way back on federal services and programs after all."
That's the David Stockman quadrille. They thought Bush was lying to everybody else.
There are at least four different kinds of moonquakes: (1) deep moonquakes about 700 km below the surface, probably caused by tides; (2) vibrations from the impact of meteorites; (3) thermal quakes caused by the expansion of the frigid crust when first illuminated by the morning sun after two weeks of deep-freeze lunar night; and (4) shallow moonquakes only 20 or 30 kilometers below the surface.
The first three were generally mild and harmless. Shallow moonquakes on the other hand were doozies. Between 1972 and 1977, the Apollo seismic network saw twenty-eight of them; a few "registered up to 5.5 on the Richter scale," says Neal. A magnitude 5 quake on Earth is energetic enough to move heavy furniture and crack plaster.
Furthermore, shallow moonquakes lasted a remarkably long time. Once they got going, all continued more than 10 minutes. "The moon was ringing like a bell," Neal says.
On Earth, vibrations from quakes usually die away in only half a minute. The reason has to do with chemical weathering, Neal explains: "Water weakens stone, expanding the structure of different minerals. When energy propagates across such a compressible structure, it acts like a foam sponge—it deadens the vibrations." Even the biggest earthquakes stop shaking in less than 2 minutes.
The moon, however, is dry, cool and mostly rigid, like a chunk of stone or iron. So moonquakes set it vibrating like a tuning fork. Even if a moonquake isn't intense, "it just keeps going and going," Neal says.
- I so want this blue LED faucet light.
I've got at least 5 more links I could post, but I woke up really late today ( ! 12:45 ! ) so I'm in a rush.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 03:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 16, 2006
"I really don't know any German." "That's alright, I know a little German—he's sitting over there."
- Pew Research has released a new poll. So how is Bush doing? via
Bush's overall approval measure stands at 33%, the lowest rating of his presidency. Bush's job performance mark is now about the same as the ratings for Democratic and Republican congressional leaders (34% and 32%, respectively), which showed no improvement in spite of public approval of the congressional response to the ports deal.
The president's ratings for handling of several specific issues, particularly terrorism, have also declined sharply. Just 42% now approve of Bush's job in handling terrorist threats, an 11-point drop since February. In January 2005, as Bush was starting his second term, 62% approved of his handling of terrorist threats.
Bush's personal image also has weakened noticeably, which is reflected in people's one-word descriptions of the president. Honesty had been the single trait most closely associated with Bush, but in the current survey "incompetent" is the descriptor used most frequently (See pp. 7-8).
- lowfat is a new photo organizing/editing application with an innovative, clean user interface metaphor. via
Todays file-management interfaces are more or less the same for the last 10 years. Ok we have thumbnail-previews in our icons to reflect the actual file-contents, but it is still only a stand-in or substitution for the real thing. But it’s not very real-world-like, where you have e.g. a bunch of photos or document-sheets that you just can look at to see what’s in them. It’s not really a seamless experience. On the other hand there are desktop search-tools like beagle and Spotlight, which help us find the kind of things we are currently interested in from our huge heaps of personal data. Thus we don’t see the unhandy clutter of hierarchical file-systems. Would it not be great if the computer could show us just the stuff we currently interested in, in a natural fashion where there’s only our documents and hardly any UI at all?
- This nicely-detailed Guardian report from 2004 on Prescott Bush's ties to the Nazis takes advantage of newly declassified documentation. via
"This was the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power, this was the mechanism by which the Third Reich's defence industry was re-armed, this was the mechanism by which Nazi profits were repatriated back to the American owners, this was the mechanism by which investigations into the financial laundering of the Third Reich were blunted," said Loftus, who is vice-chairman of the Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg.
"The Union Banking Corporation was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen," said Loftus. "At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn't until the Nazis took over Holland that they realised that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely bely that, it's absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were."
"There is no one left alive who could be prosecuted but they did get away with it," said Loftus. "As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averill Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany."
- Halo 3 is dead. Long live Forerunner.
- "This is a disgrace. Really, it's sickening." Jake Tapper, whose intrepid reporting got me through the 2000 election, is outraged by today's Senate vote to raise the federal debt ceiling.
Imagine if your credit card company was telling you that you were unbelievably overdrawn -- and your counterproposal to your creditors was that they increase your credit limit so you could keep living in a house from MTV "Cribs," driving a Bentley, and drinking Courvoisier. (Word.)
Meanwhile, the Grand Old Party's insincerity on this issue is staggering.
"I've got a tool, and that's called a veto," President Bush said in 2002, speaking to leaders of the Fiscal Responsibility Coalition. "I don't think that's going to be necessary, because I believe, in this difficult time for America, there's a common spirit on Capitol Hill, and one that we can promote and use for the benefit of the people."
The president has yet to veto one spending bill.
Ten years ago, with a Democrat in the White House, our Republican leaders found such debt morally offensive.
- Jake's also got a golden post today about an issue on which there is a true bipartisan consensus: the fecklessness of the Democratic Party.
The inability of the opposition party to capitalize on one of the most horrible years President George W. Bush has even ever known is nothing short of remarkable.
Is this what a majority party looks like to you?
Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) brushed past the press pack, shaking her head and waving her hand over her shoulder. When an errant food cart blocked her entrance to the meeting room, she tried to hide from reporters behind the 4-foot-11 Barbara Mikulski (Md.).
"Ask her after lunch," offered Clinton's spokesman, Philippe Reines. But Clinton, with most of her colleagues, fled the lunch out a back door as if escaping a fire.
- Kick ass multi-function pen can be used as a ballpoint, highlighter, pencil, stylus, and standard/metric ruler. via
- I haven't played around with it yet, and I'm not even sure exactly what it is, but playsh turns the command-line into a MUD. via
- The Guardian has got its hands on a hitherto-classified memo from Tony Blair's special envoy to Iraq. It demonstrates that there were people on the ground, at least in the British contingent, who knew immediately after Saddam's overthrow that things were not going swimmingly. It's just...no one listened to them. via
Reconstruction
10. With security and credible de-Ba'athification will come the chance for durable reconstruction. Power is back, though is not robust. Water is running but is not potable. 40% of Baghdad's sewage is pouring into the Tigris untreated. A GSM mobile phone system is desperately needed as communications are dire. Bechtel who have the main contract are moving far too slowly.
11. Quick results projects are also needed to show there is progress. We need visibly successful projects, however small: schools and hospitals reopening, new bakeries, food distribution points. That is not a substitute for long term development, but it would meet genuine needs.
Information
12. Baghdad has no TV, and no newspapers apart from party political rags. I was given two fliers yesterday, one calling for the assassination of all Ba'athists, the other for the killing of all US forces. That, and rumour, are the only information flowing. An ORHA TV project is due but its content will be tightly controlled and it risks not being credible. I have pressed them, as a start, to broadcast a Premier League game each day, but the Americans don't yet get it.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 02:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 14, 2006
"When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did."
- On this Pi Day I relink to "The Mountains of Pi," a classic article profiling the mathematicians who inspired the movie Pi. Alas, I've always been more a fan of phi.
- Is the Tunguska Blast responsible for global warming because it disturbed the noctilucent cloud layer?
- The Federal Digital Signature Standard Algorithm, or DSA, has been expanded to accept keys of up to 3072 bits in length.
- Prions invade Alabamian cattle
- Nifty CSS-based photo gallery system allows roll-over previews without JavaScript. via
- IED makers craftier than IED defusers. via
The bomb makers have progressed from using washing-machine timers and pressure switches for initiating explosions, to cell phone and walkie-talkie signals, and even infrared beams.
The IED analysts are vitally interested in placement-concealment tactics. The bombs can be found in roadside garbage bags or sandbags, in piles of rocks, buried in holes, in sheep or dog carcasses. One was recently discovered disguised as concrete street-side curbing.
Hoaxes are a peril. “The enemy’s very smart,” said Capt. Peter Weld, Sisk’s commander. “They plant a harmless device that soldiers find and gather around, and then they hit them with a real device nearby.”
“Shaped charges” are also proliferating — killer explosives that direct armor-piercing projectiles into U.S. vehicles.
- Beautiful underwater photography of nude models. via
- How did I not know that Bare Bones Software, the illustrious originator of BB "It doesn't suck" Edit, also offers a general-purpose AES-encrypted information-storage/note-taking/organization application? Indeed they do, and it is called Yojimbo. I especially like the humorous tour—note how the example of an encrypted password is a PIN for a Bank of Qwghlm set aside for the Bavarian Illuminati's Widows and Orphans Fund. via
- Someone with the EFF has published notes of a talk about wiretapping security holes. It's fascinating—analog taps are vulnerable to the same DTMF control tones phreakers used to exploit with blue boxes, and most of the newer, digital taps are backwards-compatible with the old units. What does this mean? via
This is actually a lot like the blue box problem with regard to 2600 Hz tones. The telephone system used to use in-band signalling where tones played within the communication channel itself would control the communication equipment; this allowed phone phreaks to make free phone calls by playing the right tone. (If someone you don't trust is using your equipment, letting tones they play control how your equipment behave can be a bit of a security risk.) But wiretappers apparently didn't learn this lesson: "If in-band signalling was good enough for AT&T, it should be good enough for the FBI." There is a close analogy between the blue box vulnerability and the wiretap equipment's vulnerability. Sure enough, sending a C tone down your target line doesn't cause your call to hang up but it does call the DNR at the LEA to ignore the communications coming in over the friendly line. It indicates that the call has ended and turns off the recording equipment.
You can therefore fake a lot of different events and cause the evidence collected by the LEA to be wrong.
Countermeasure #3: disabling audio recording. You don't have to send a full-volume C tone. You can send a very quiet C tone in the background to suppress recording. This is sufficient. Either the wiretap subject or the other party can do this. The automatic gain control in the DNR will cause the DNR to detect the quiet C tone.
- AksMe: "How long would it take before a zombie's muscles were no longer functional?" (with visual aids)
Rigor happens in human corpses because the cells are no longer producing ATP and so the myosin remains bound to the actin filaments. The energy released by hydrolysis of ATP is required to free the myosin head from the actin and so bring the muscle fibre into a relaxed state. Rigor dissipated after a period of time when decay products are released that digest the actin-myosin complex and enable the muscles to relax into flaccidity pending their dissolution.
Obviously zombies do not suffer from rigor. I suspect they obtain new ATP using a novel metabolic pathway. I suspect they have mutated mitochondria that can produce massive quantities of ATP from glucose rich-sources. Hence their insatiable hunger for the brains of their victims. As well as their well-known sweet tooth for chocolate, of course.
posted by meehawl at 11:33 PM EST on March 11 [!]
In a study of East Asians, Europeans and Africans, Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues found 700 regions of the genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection in recent times. In East Asians, the average date of these selection events is 6,600 years ago.
Many of the reshaped genes are involved in taste, smell or digestion, suggesting that East Asians experienced some wrenching change in diet. Since the genetic changes occurred around the time that rice farming took hold, they may mark people's adaptation to a historical event, the beginning of the Neolithic revolution as societies switched from wild to cultivated foods.
Some of the genes are active in the brain and, although their role is not known, may have affected behavior. So perhaps the brain gene changes seen by Dr. Pritchard in East Asians have some connection with the psychological traits described by Dr. Nisbett.
Some geneticists believe the variations they are seeing in the human genome are so recent that they may help explain historical processes. "Since it looks like there has been significant evolutionary change over historical time, we're going to have to rewrite every history book ever written," said Gregory Cochran, a population geneticist at the University of Utah. "The distribution of genes influencing relevant psychological traits must have been different in Rome than it is today," he added. "The past is not just another country but an entirely different kind of people."
John McNeill, a historian at Georgetown University, said that "it should be no surprise to anyone that human nature is not a constant" and that selective pressures have probably been stronger in the last 10,000 years than at any other epoch in human evolution. Genetic information could therefore have a lot to contribute, although only a minority of historians might make use of it, he said.
It is easy to imagine that in societies where trust pays off, generation after generation, the more trusting individuals would have more progeny and the oxytocin-promoting genes would become more common in the population. If conditions should then change, and the society be engulfed by strife and civil warfare for generations, oxytocin levels might fall as the paranoid produced more progeny.
Since the agricultural revolution, humans have to a large extent created their own environment. But that does not mean the genome has ceased to evolve. The genome can respond to cultural practices as well as to any other kind of change. Northern Europeans, for instance, are known to have responded genetically to the drinking of cow's milk, a practice that began in the Funnel Beaker Culture which thrived 6,000 to 5,000 years ago. They developed lactose tolerance, the unusual ability to digest lactose in adulthood. The gene, which shows up in Dr. Pritchard's test, is almost universal among people of Holland and Sweden who live in the region of the former Funnel Beaker culture.
The most recent example of a society's possible genetic response to its circumstances is one advanced by Dr. Cochran and Henry Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. In an article last year they argued that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases found among Ashkenazi Jews (those of Central and Eastern Europe) was a response to the demands for increased intelligence imposed when Jews were largely confined to the intellectually demanding professions of money lending and tax farming. Though this period lasted only from 900 A.D. to about 1700, it was long enough, the two scientists argue, for natural selection to favor any variant gene that enhanced cognitive ability.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 03, 2006
~Plan failed fully 'cause you failed to fully plan~
Light posting for the next week. Goin' on a cruise.
But first, a link dump.
- Unbelievably pretty satellite photo of the Richat Structure in the Sahara Desert. via
- Google tries not be evil by moving search records out of China and informing Chinese searchers when their results have been censored.
Some of the people want to query about democracy, but most of them just want to know about their pop stars.
- That article I linked to the other day about the pick-up artists? The Village Voice has withdrawn it for being partially fabricated. via
- Neocon Fukuyama: "neocons responsible for screwing up Iraq."
- 3,600 years ago, people in modern-day Germany were able to use a bronze disc to synchronize their lunar and solar calendars by adding a leap day every three or four years. They used the same formula the Babylonians would write down a millennium later.
The Bronze Age astronomers would hold the Nebra clock against the sky and observe the position of the celestial objects. The intercalary month was inserted when what they saw in the sky corresponded to the map on the disc they were holding in their hands. This happened every two to three years.
But the German researchers also discovered that in the 400 years that the disc was in use, its status had evolved. The perforations on the edge of the object as well as a ship that was later added to the map suggest that the knowledge about the lunar calendar's shortage of days was lost along the way.
- Rats replay memories...backwards. via
- Incredible video of gameplay from Spore.
BUSH: You know, it's interesting, you said that one of the things that we love doing is to invite our buddies up from Texas. And I think about the time we had Jones, Procter and Selee [sic]. These are guys we grew up with in Midland, Texas. They are down to earth, you know, they have no agenda, except being with their friends Laura and George.
VARGAS: They call you George?
BUSH: No, they call me Mr. President.
VARGAS: I was going to say…
BUSH: They probably don't want to call me Mr. President, but they do call me Mr. President.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 26, 2006
"None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. YOU'RE locked up in here with ME."
- Fox News is busy asking the important questions, like "ALL-OUT CIVIL WAR IN IRAQ: COULD IT BE A GOOD THING?" I shit you not. Media Matters has screenshots. via
But enough about Iraq. You should read about that elsewhere.
- A quick way to compare the picture quality of DVDs vs HD is to check out this visual comparison of The Fellowship of the Ring in standard versus high-def. Be sure to click on the images—the HD pictures on the main page have been scaled down to DVD rez. via
- Damon Lindelof, the co-creator of Lost, is a huge fan of Watchmen, as is Joss Whedon. Watchmen, is, like the best comic ever. Here's a great explanation of Watchmen's influence on Lost:
As the mystery unfolds, the story cuts between the present, where an investigation takes place, and the past, formatted as “origin” stories focusing on a single character. (Sound familiar?) Each hero’s “origin” chapter often intersects with the others’ revealing different perspectives to the same moment.
*Each chapter is named after a snatch of a song lyric or famous quote. More interestingly, each chapter ends with the whole song title or quote cited, revealing more of that quote’s meaning and serving as a resounding footnote to the just completed chapter.
*The entire series is littered with repeating motifs and images, specifically clocks (most set to the time of the Hiroshima atomic bomb detonation), mirrors and other allusions to reflections and dualities and smiley faces marred with blood. Of course we’re all aware of Lost’s motifs: the Numbers, black/white, dysfunctional families, eyes, etc. In Watchmen however these repeating motifs don’t have any significance to the plot. They serve instead to reinforce the overall theme of the book: that everything is destined, not by the hand of anyone, but simply because, if you step outside of time, the past, the present and the future all share one moment. This sounds like the fatalism of predestination, but Watchmen seems to suggest there’s actually comfort to be found in it. As Dr. Manhattan proclaims: “Nothing Ends, Adrian, Nothing EVER ends.” In their last podcast prior to "One of Them", Cuse and Lindelof said as much: the Numbers may have no specific meaning but they’re recurrence is a statement about the nature of the universe,
*The crossovers of characters from one flashback to the other spin out of predestination: that everyone on The Island is, has been and always will be connected. In a life where we may not control our own destiny, comfort is found in knowing there are others with you along for the ride. In the pre-One of Them podcast, Lindelof and Cuse talked about the appearance of Kate’s mother in Sawyer’s flashback as an example of the interconnectedness of the human family and did not discuss it as a major plot point.
*Each chapter concludes with historical documents that while not central to the story, add significant background dimension to it. The Oceanic-Air and Hanso Foundation sites act the same way.
*Lost is set-up to be a myth. Most comics (really, all the good ones) are modern myths, serving the same purposes tales of the Greek gods served millennia ago. They’re to guide us through the difficulties of our lives and are an intuitive means of passing on the previous generations’ wisdom to the up-and-coming one. Lost is the Myth for the 21st Century, a modern superhero origin story without the childish trappings.
The story, such as it is, involves aspiring manga artist Robin Nishi (also the name of the man who create the manga that this film is adapted from) meeting his childhood girlfriend Myon, only to hear that she is about to become engaged to big, handsome Ryo. He offers his congratulations, of course, even if he's still carrying a huge torch for her. It's not to be, though, as a pair of yakuza burst into the bar run by Myon's sister Yan, looking for the girls' father, and kill Nishi (in a most humiliating manner) as he tries to stand up for Myon.
But wait! Nishi pulls a fast one on God, returns to Earth moments before his death, and turns the tables. He and the girls make a run for it, stealing the gangsters' car, only to be chased by what seems like half the yakuza in a mad dash that sends them careening off into the water. The car is swallowed by a whale, and inside they encounter a man who has been living there for thirty years, and has built himself a sort of treehouse out of other junk that the beast has swallowed.
- AksMe: Intelligent Anime?
1.Use what is already available from the DSLinux project as a basis.
2.Implement a touchable on-screen keyboard.
3.Make a standard 80x25 console that looks nice and is readable on the top display and communicates with on-screen keyboard.
4.Implement a lite version of X.
5.Use Busybox for standard commands to keep use uf CPU low.
6.Design an upside-down web-browser with controls that dock on the top of the bottom screen, while the content of the browser is displayed at the top. Probably going to end up being a port of Dillo.
7.Design key-bindings for the NDS controller to make operation on the desktop easy. Will probably end up feeling like your playing Dead-or-alive.
- Microsoft is poised to release a new consumer electronics device codenamed Origami. Apparently it performs the roles of a camera, phone, handheld, camcorder, or audio player, depending on how you fold it. I predict that it will fail, both because it is Microsoft's first attempt at a new market, and because the only thing Microsoft does worse at than making something that does one thing well is making something that does everything adequately.
- Back in December I linked to the story of a marijuana cave bust in Tennessee, and now there are pictures available of this amazing, underground grow-op. via
MySpace perplexes me. I am mystified by its popularity, and I dislike it enough that I'd feel uncomfortable linking to it. Websites like it have been around for years...Orkut, Friendster, FaceBook. Why is MySpace so incredibly popular? What makes this bastard spawn of a dating site and a web forum so different? It seems like half the people I've ever met in my life have a MySpace account. I asked one friend why he's a member, and he said a friend urged him to join. I asked another why MySpace was so popular, and she said:
Sonja: im hooked
Sonja: have you explored it?
Sonja: u make a page of blog and codes
Sonja: u can post comments which is messages u can leave people.
Sonja: my friends insert photos siully ones
Sonja: leave me messages... u can describe urself in it
Sonja: its like putting urself out there ig uess
Sonja: it gets addicting bc u want to know if any one asked u to be their friend... or did anyone leave me any comments..
Sonja: loads of bands put themselves on it
Sonja: to try and introduce themselves to the world thru myspace
Me: why does it seem that *everyone* is using it? people are constantly browsing through it during class, old acquaintances whose names i barely remember are on it, etc.
Sonja: probably bc its more catchy to be saying "yeah im on myspace" its your space
Sonja: i dont know.. im on facebook as well.. myspace u can do cooler more editing personalizing things
...which I took to mean that part of the reason it's popular is that MySpace confers a sense of ownership or property to its users, by everything from having more customization options to the name itself implying that it belongs to them.
- In "Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace," Danah Boyd puts forth a different explanation of the site's appeal, at least for teens: via
When MySpace was initially introduced, skeptics thought that it would be just another fad because previous sites like Friendster had risen and crashed. Unlike the 20-somethings who invaded Friendster, the teens have more reason to participate in profile creation and public commentary. Furthermore, MySpace's messaging is better suited for youths' asynchronous messaging needs. They can send messages directly from friends' profiles and check whether or not their friends have logged in and received their email. Unlike adults, youth are not invested in email; their primary peer-to-peer communication occurs synchronously over IM. Their use of MySpace is complementing that practice.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 06:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 24, 2006
"I saw death rising from the earth, from the ground itself, in one blue field, in stubbled color."
I've got a bunch of sciencey links I could post, but I think I'll save those for this weekend...
- There's an interesting article in Wired that explains all the delays Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly adaptation has endured. I say it's interesting—for example, who knew that Winona Ryder was Timothy Leary's goddaughter?—but beware...it's also as disillusioning as examining a cross-section of a McRib sandwich. This tale of woe involves animators getting locked out of their office while they went to go get coffee, and Linklater saying he never wants to do another animated film. via
- Thad Anderson was clever enough to file a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Defense for a copy of Steven Cambone's notes from his meetings on 9/11 with Rumsfeld. Then, even better, he posted the notes to Flickr. Those notes are where the 9/11 Commission, amongst others, discovered that Rumsfeld wanted to go after "things related and not" to the attacks. via
The released notes document Donald Rumsfeld's 2:40 PM instructions to General Myers to find the "[b]est info fast . . . judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time - not only UBL [Usama Bin Laden]" (as discussed on p. 334-335 of the 9/11 Commission Report and in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack).
In addition, the documents confirm the contents of CBS News' Sept. 4, 2002 report "Plans For Iraq Attack Began on 9/11," which quoted Rumsfeld's notes as stating: "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not." These lines were not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report or Woodward's Plan of Attack, and to my knowledge, have not been independently confirmed by any other source. After the Rathergate fiasco, I wondered if CBS had been fooled into publishing a story that, from a publicity perspective, seemed too good to be true.
Finally, these documents unveil a previously undisclosed part of the 2:40 PM discussion. Several lines below the "judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. at same time" line, Cambone's notes from the conversation read: "Hard to get a good case."
- Acclaimed conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan, upon viewing the Flickr gallery, was shocked! Which is hilarious, since, as Matt Yglesias points out, all of us who cared had known the contents for years. The only thing that's changed now is we have scans of the actual handwritten notes. via
- Great MetaFilter post of free online educational resources. Perfect for the autodidact.
Simply stated, Netcat makes and accepts Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) connections. That’s it! Netcat writes and reads data over those connections until they are closed. It provides a basic TCP/UDP networking subsystem that allows users to interact manually or via script with network applications and services on the application layer. It lets us see raw TCP and UDP data before it gets wrapped in the next highest layer such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), or Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
Posted by Jon Rubin at 03:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 21, 2006
"Once and for all, beyond fantasy, in the depth of his soul he declared war on the statutory ape, on law and order, on predictability, on negative entropy."
- New A Scanner Darkly trailer [direct link to QuickTime file] via
- Dean Kamen, Segway's creator (among many other things), is testing two utilities for the developing world. One is a Stirling engine that generates power from cow dung, and the other is a very efficient water filter that can even wring potable water out of raw sewage. Kamen sees a symbiotic relationship, where the filter's waste provides the fuel for the generator. I remember years ago, when rumors first started about Kamen and a Stirling engine. That was before the Segway came out, and everyone thought Ginger was going to be Stirling-powered. This is better. via
- Chris Bowers' has an idea for the Democrats' 2006 message: via
Do you disapprove of the way the congress is doing its job?
Republicans control congress.
In Washington, DC, Republicans have a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Tom DeLay was the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives for three years. Last year, he was forced to resign because he is under indictment for money laundering charges.
Do you disapprove of the way congress is doing its job?
Republicans control congress.
Paid for by the Democratic National Committee.
At one point, Linus had implemented device files in /dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day.
- Check out America's first animated short, "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces." It turns 100 on April 6th. via
- CodeTek makes a product that enables virtual desktops in OS X.
- dios actually contributed something useful to MetaFilter: a long post on Canons of Construction. Maybe he really is a lawyer...
- "Man the Hunter" is a myth; humans were prey, not predators, until 60,000 years ago. via
"Australopithecus afarensis was probably quite strong, like a small ape," Sussman says. Adults ranged from around 3 to 5 feet and they weighed 60-100 pounds. They were basically smallish bipedal primates. Their teeth were relatively small, very much like modern humans, and they were fruit and nut eaters.
But what Sussman and Hart discovered is that Australopithecus afarensis was not dentally pre-adapted to eat meat. "It didn't have the sharp shearing blades necessary to retain and cut such foods," Sussman says. "These early humans simply couldn't eat meat. If they couldn't eat meat, why would they hunt?"
It was not possible for early humans to consume a large amount of meat until fire was controlled and cooking was possible. Sussman points out that the first tools didn't appear until two million years ago. And there wasn't good evidence of fire until after 800,000 years ago. "In fact, some archaeologists and paleontologists don't think we had a modern, systematic method of hunting until as recently as 60,000 years ago," he says.
"Furthermore, Australopithecus afarensis was an edge species," adds Sussman. They could live in the trees and on the ground and could take advantage of both. "Primates that are edge species, even today, are basically prey species, not predators," Sussman argues.
The predators living at the same time as Australopithecus afarensis were huge and there were 10 times as many as today. There were hyenas as big as bears, as well as saber-toothed cats and many other mega-sized carnivores, reptiles and raptors. Australopithecus afarensis didn't have tools, didn't have big teeth and was three feet tall. He was using his brain, his agility and his social skills to get away from these predators. "He wasn't hunting them," says Sussman. "He was avoiding them at all costs."
Approximately 6 percent to 10 percent of early humans were preyed upon according to evidence that includes teeth marks on bones, talon marks on skulls and holes in a fossil cranium into which sabertooth cat fangs fit, says Sussman. The predation rate on savannah antelope and certain ground-living monkeys today is around 6 percent to 10 percent as well.
Sussman and Hart provide evidence that many of our modern human traits, including those of cooperation and socialization, developed as a result of being a prey species and the early human's ability to out-smart the predators. These traits did not result from trying to hunt for prey or kill our competitors, says Sussman.
"One of the main defenses against predators by animals without physical defenses is living in groups," says Sussman. "In fact, all diurnal primates (those active during the day) live in permanent social groups. Most ecologists agree that predation pressure is one of the major adaptive reasons for this group-living. In this way there are more eyes and ears to locate the predators and more individuals to mob them if attacked or to confuse them by scattering. There are a number of reasons that living in groups is beneficial for animals that otherwise would be very prone to being preyed upon."
According to latest statistics – which Ms Rice did not mention – crude oil production this month is running at 1.7m barrels a day, down from a post-invasion peak of 2.5m in September 2004 that was close to prewar levels.
Ms Rice initially asserted that “many more Iraqis” were now getting potable water and sewerage services. However, under intense questioning from Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, she conceded that although “capacity” had increased, fewer Iraqis were actually receiving those services.
Senator Conrad, citing the special inspector general, said almost all economic indices showed Iraq was better off before the US had invaded.
- Nice list of OS X freeware via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 15, 2006
"All politics are local." Except when they're national.
- It seems the top judges of the FISA court were warned multiple times about the NSA program: via
So early in 2002, the wary court and government lawyers developed a compromise. Any case in which the government listened to someone's calls without a warrant, and later developed information to seek a FISA warrant for that same suspect, was to be carefully "tagged" as having involved some NSA information. Generally, there were fewer than 10 cases each year, the sources said.
According to government officials familiar with the program, the presiding FISA judges insisted that information obtained through NSA surveillance not form the basis for obtaining a warrant and that, instead, independently gathered information provide the justification for FISA monitoring in such cases. They also insisted that these cases be presented only to the presiding judge.
Lamberth and Kollar-Kotelly derived significant comfort from the trust they had in Baker, the government's liaison to the FISA court. He was a stickler-for-rules career lawyer steeped in foreign intelligence law, and had served as deputy director of the office before becoming the chief in 2001.
Baker also had privately expressed hesitation to his bosses about whether the domestic spying program conflicted with the FISA law, a government official said. Justice higher-ups viewed him as suspect, but they also recognized that he had the judges' confidence and kept him in the pivotal position of obtaining warrants to spy on possible terrorists.
In 2004, Baker warned Kollar-Kotelly he had a problem with the tagging system. He had concluded that the NSA was not providing him with a complete and updated list of the people it had monitored, so Justice could not definitively know -- and could not alert the court -- if it was seeking FISA warrants for people already spied on, government officials said.
Kollar-Kotelly complained to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, and her concerns led to a temporary suspension of the program. The judge required that high-level Justice officials certify the information was complete -- or face possible perjury charges.
In 2005, Baker learned that at least one government application for a FISA warrant probably contained NSA information that was not made clear to the judges, the government officials said. Some administration officials explained to Kollar-Kotelly that a low-level Defense Department employee unfamiliar with court disclosure procedures had made a mistake.
Kollar-Kotelly asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to ensure that wouldn't happen again, government officials said.
- Media Matters has collated a dozen of the bullshit excuses for the NSA program the Bush administration has fed to the media, and strongly debunked each one. via
- Spying law ruled unconstitutional! A Hong Kong spying law, that is... via
The ruling effectively means that for 15 years, law enforcement authorities have had unfettered discretion to violate the privacy of Hong Kong citizens protected by the Bill of Rights Ordinance implemented in 1991.
Quoting from a 2005 Court of Final Appeal judgment, Hartmann said the right to private communication must be protected by a law that "must be accessible to the citizen and must be formulated with sufficient precision to enable the citizen to regulate his conduct."
The current section of the law authorizing wiretapping "does not in any detail regulate the scope of the Chief Executive's discretion or the manner in which it may be exercised," ruled Hartmann. "It is plainly inadequate."
- Meanwhile, the NSA spying scandal led Glenn Greenwald to ask a question that's evoked a lot of response from other bloggers: Do Bush followers have an ideology? The whole piece is well worth reading. It posits that the Republican party has pushed the real conservatives and moderates to the fringes, and has substituted a cult of personality for actual policy.
It used to be the case that in order to be considered a "liberal" or someone "of the Left," one had to actually ascribe to liberal views on the important policy issues of the day – social spending, abortion, the death penalty, affirmative action, immigration, "judicial activism," hate speech laws, gay rights, utopian foreign policies, etc. etc. These days, to be a "liberal," such views are no longer necessary.
Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a "liberal," regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more "liberal" one is. Whether one is a "liberal" -- or, for that matter, a "conservative" -- is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush.
- For those of us who have been concerned about this a little longer than Mr. Greenwald, his blog post serves as a reminder of David Neiwert's excellent series of articles, The Rise of Pseudo Fascism. It is also chillingly similar to Umberto Eco's 14 Points of Ur-Fascism.
- In the comments of Greenwald's pièce de resistance, someone points out a relevant example from the yearly ultra-right gathering, CPAC:
"Are we losing our lodestar, which is the Bill of Rights?" Barr beseeched the several hundred conservatives at the Omni Shoreham in Woodley Park. "Are we in danger of putting allegiance to party ahead of allegiance to principle?"
Barr answered in the affirmative. "Do we truly remain a society that believes that . . . every president must abide by the law of this country?" he posed. "I, as a conservative, say yes. I hope you as conservatives say yes."
But nobody said anything in the deathly quiet audience. Barr merited only polite applause when he finished, and one man, Richard Sorcinelli, booed him loudly. "I can't believe I'm in a conservative hall listening to him say [Bush] is off course trying to defend the United States," Sorcinelli fumed.
- The same commenter points out another example, this time coming from the odious Free Republic. In this lesson in hypocrisy, one discovers that Republicans were against violations of FISA before they were for them. via
- And since it takes three examples to make a trend, here we have how the Bush administration treats its net activists. via
The plans for the launch of GOP.com last spring included two things that have never made it to the light of day - a viral fundraising component, and a "MyGOP" functionality that would have let activists build a MySpace-like site on GOP.com. Practical reality set in, however, and killed both. The trouble with the MyGOP concept was the conflict it created with incredibly tight internal controls on message.
When we were forced to pull a Social Security Testimonials tool off the site because someone dared to use the word "private" instead of the more acceptable "personal" accounts, it became apparent that our internal tolerance for self-expression would not allow that sort of openness. Arguments that restrictions of that nature are ridiculous and hamper our ability to be effective online were met with stony silence. In the end, MyGOP went nowhere.
The fundraising tool was a different problem altogether. The fact is, allowing that sort of functionality causes a slew of legal problems that the FEC (and clearly the Democrats) have not considered. We looked at developing an ActRed site, but the legal restrictions prevent a national committee from doing so. It could be done by a third party, and I undertand several are working on the concept. Unfortunately, the RNC is bound by FEC laws, not to mention our party rules, and would run afoul of both.
As far as I know, a viral fundraising tool is still under development. However, given a tendency within the RNC to view the site as nothing more than a communications vehicle - a really, really, expensive brochure - I'm not sure when that may get done.
For anyone who is casting aspersions on Patrick Ruffini, I would caution against that. Patrick is pretty much the only friend we have in that building.
- To close the NSA-scandal-related portion of this post, it seems we weren't getting much valuable intel anyway, as Al'Queda uses couriers.
U.S. law enforcement sources said that more than four years of surveillance by the National Security Agency has failed to capture any high-level al Qaeda operative in the United States. They said al Qaeda insurgents have long stopped using the phones and even computers to relay messages. Instead, they employ couriers.
"They have been way ahead of us in communications security," a law enforcement source said.
- The same article makes another disturbing claim:
Instead, federal authorities have been allowed to use non-terrorist material obtained through the surveillance program for investigation and prosecution.
In more than one case, the sources said, a surveillance target was prosecuted on non-terrorist charges from information obtained through wiretaps conducted without a court order. They said the FBI supported this policy in an attempt to pressure surveillance targets to cooperate.
- Remember when Howard Dean was castigated for saying that capturing Saddam didn't make us any safer? That's nothing compared to what the head of Israel's elite domestic security force, Shin Bet, has to say: via
When asked about the growing destabilisation of Iraq, Mr Diskin said Israel might come to rue its decision to support the US-led invasion in 2003.
"When you dismantle a system in which there is a despot who controls his people by force, you have chaos," he said.
"I'm not sure we won't miss Saddam."
- Yield curve inverts. Short-term rates are now higher than long-term rates. This is not good news.
As you can see, it is rare for short-term interest rates to be as high as or higher than long-term interest rates, a phenomenon known as an "inverted yield curve". And unfortunately, those episodes have historically corresponded to periods immediately preceeding a recession. (The US experienced recessions in 1982, 1990, and 2001.)
There are a few possible reasons for that correspondence. First, it is likely that low long-term interest rates (at least relative to short-term rates) are the result of some pretty pessimistic thinking on the part of bond market participants. Low long-term rates suggest that they think that the economy is going to slow, which will cause the demand for long-term borrowing in the economy to fall, and which will force the Fed to lower short-term rates in the not-too-distant future.
Secondly, banks make a lot of their money by borrowing at lower short-term rates and lending at higher long-term interest rates. If that differential disappears, then the financial incentive to lend money disappears. And as banks lend less money, the economy tends to slow.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 02:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 07, 2006
Ask and ye shall receive. Ask more and ye shall receive more. Repeat until the fly buzzing around the empty coffers gets lonely.
So you're the President. Your flow is low. Even your outgoing Fed chairman is saying you've "lost control" of the budget. You've already consolidated all of your loans into Hong Kong's banks. What is there to do?
First, throw a garage sale. It's not like the public watched anything on channels 60-69 anyway. OK, technically, maybe they "owned" those airwaves—whatever that means—but they will gain so much more enjoyment from paying media conglomerates for internet access and the ability to watch copy protected Hollywood movies on those frequencies! Plus, now that we as a nation have learned the many benefits of deregulation, this will be the bestest private auction of public goods ever! What had we been thinking, allowing companies to own only 45 megahertz apiece?
Still, that can only hope to raise $25 billion. Which is what? One bombing run against Iran? A quiet week in Iraq? Oh yeah. That's right. We need another $120 billion. Sure, that'll mean the War on Terror's cost $400 billion. But this is a different kind of war. It needs different kinds of money, from different kinds of sources. You can't just let Congress dilly-dally and come up with budgets on its own as if it was the governmental body with powers of the purse! You've got to wait until the money is critical and then demand it and accuse anyone who disagrees with you of being unpatriotic. Then all they're left with is whining that "We're not at war, Congress declares wars, wars have beginnings and endings!"
Which reminds me. Time to change the terms of the game. We're now not in a War on Terror or a Global Struggle With Extremism. We are in The Long War.
Administration officials seem to refer to the "long war" more frequently these days. President Bush mentioned it during his State of the Union address this week. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the term is a way of telling people the truth about the fight against terrorism. "Just as the Cold War lasted a long time, this war is something that is not going to go away," Rumsfeld said.
Well, that settles that.
Still, this might be unsettling to some. After all, wars cost money. Even The Long War. And the only thing more precious than maintaining American control of distribution of the world's oil reserves as a way to ration our enemies' energy budgets is...tax cuts. But if The War is Long, so could be its bill! How can we pay if we atrophy the nation's revenue collection system?
Luckily, there are few things our White House achieves with more regularity than successfully hoodwinking the American public into thinking they can get something for nothing. Kash over at the Angry Bear has chronicled the latest example of this ploy:
President Bush, January 20, 2004:
[W]e can cut the deficit in half over the next five years.
President Bush, February 8, 2005:
[My budget] keeps us on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009.
President Bush, January 6, 2006:
[W]e are still on track to cut the federal deficit in half by 2009.
President Bush, January 26, 2006:
[W]e can cut our deficit in half by 2009 and make sure the American people still get their tax relief.
Of course, that's patently impossible, as Kash points out with a graph, and I will attempt to in words.
This is something all serious Americans have been concerned about since Bush's first Presidential campaign. I noticed it when I was following Gore's 2000 campaign for a high school political science class, and explained it so:
Gore's speech and campaign focused on prescription drugs, Social Security, and targeted tax cuts. Besides Bush's apparent hesitancy to even touch the topic of health care, as evidence in his Texas record, Gore knew Bush would be helpless when it came to Social Security.
Why? Because in the primaries, the Governor promised an across-the-board tax cut as a response to the projected budget surplus. There was no mathematical way he could, at the same time, lower taxes significantly and shore up Social Security. Bush was extremely innovative in his response: he dodged the issue. Throughout the campaign season, the Democrats would prove to be consistently confounded by an opposing party that had learned to "think outside of the box." Al Gore has, as shown in his nomination speech and his response in the debates, an extremely organized mind. He practically thinks in essays. His mind works off the idea of point/counter-point. Bush's team, though, quickly realized that the best defense was no defense. By not responding to the Democrats' questions, they left the Democrats' empty-handed. Any ads or press releases that questioned Bush's lack of response were quickly labeled "mean-spirited" by a media itching for a chance to show the Vice-President as the aggressive, partisan backstabber that the GOP was caricaturing him as. Gore thought the ball was in Bush's court, but to the Republicans and the American people, the ball simply vanished.
While the Bush budget does show a halving of the deficit as a percent of GDP by 2009 (though not in dollar terms), the administration's budget document showing this fall is suspiciously vague about the assumptions it incorporates regarding spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, future tax cuts, and AMT relief. All of these major factors affecting the budget are frequently excluded from Bush administration budget forecasts whenever they are inconvenient to their rhetorical goals.
Reduce the deficit. Lower taxes. Save Social Security. Revamp the Alternative Minimum Tax. Pay for the military. Choose 3.
Actually, that's a little optimistic. If you choose "Lower taxes," I think you can only pick one other.
This all assumes peak oil doesn't happen, the housing bubble doesn't collapse, and we don't invade any more countries or spend billions and billions of dollars doing more bureaucratic restructuring like the DHS and the new intelligence organization.
So what does the White House do? Release stats showing how healthy the government's finances are...assuming the deficit is lowered, tax cuts aren't extended, Social Security isn't saved, the AMT destroys the middle class, and our little misadventures in the Third World end immediately.
As succinctly stated by the Budget Committee Chairman, Republican Senator Judd Gregg, the administration's forecast "takes into account things that probably aren't going to happen."
Meanwhile, Bush mouths sweet nothings straight out of 1992 about a bipartisan commission to figure out how bad these problems are, ignoring all the research that's already been done.
We've been playing this game for six years now. Personally, I'm finding it a little tedious. It was mystifying six years ago, before I knew who Grover Norquist was. He's the dude who wants to shrink the government until it's small enough to drown in a bath tub. His plan proceeds swimmingly:
The House yesterday narrowly approved a contentious budget-cutting package that would save nearly $40 billion over five years by imposing substantial changes on programs including Medicaid, welfare, child support and student lending.
With its presidential signature all but assured, the bill represents the first effort in nearly a decade to try to slow the growth of entitlement programs, one that will be felt by millions of Americans. Women on welfare are likely to face longer hours of work, education or community service to qualify for their checks. Recipients of Medicaid can expect to face higher co-payments and deductibles, especially on expensive prescription drugs and emergency room visits for non-emergency care. More affluent seniors will find it far more difficult to qualify for Medicaid-covered nursing care.
College students could face higher interest rates when their banks get squeezed by the federal government. And some cotton farmers will find support payments nicked. State-led efforts to force deadbeat parents to pay their child support may also have to be curtailed.
As Kash, again, points out, this isn't about cutting the deficit. Otherwise, they wouldn't be extending the tax cuts at the same time—tax cuts which put us more in the red than these obviously justifiable social programs. The real goal is destroying government entitlements, since entitlements are one of the main ways the federal government is able to manipulate the states.
The odd part is, these guys know the public likes this entitlement shit. There's a reason Bush's SOTUs are always chock-full of ridiculous expenditures like Mars jaunts. They make good TV and good politics. If the Republicans in the executive branch were about politics as usual, that would be what's important. However, these guys are ideologues. They have specific goals and intentions totally at odds with their public agenda. Thus we get humor like this:
WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.
They're not even conservatives anymore. Even apolitical entertainment websites like Fark can pick up on that:
[Obvious] Bush to send $2.7 trillion budget to Congress, a large part allocated to printing dictionaries with a new definition for the word "conservative"
To phrase it differently, Bush's deficits are so large that they alone account for 45% of the national debt.
There's a classic political science book called Anatomy of Revolution, by Crane Brinton. He tried to craft a conceptual model of revolutions, using the analogy of stages of a sickness, from the initial symptoms through recovery.
One of the clearest lessons from the book is that a nation's finances are a clear sign of its fortunes. In the late 1700s, France was a rich country but its government was insolvent, due to unwise military adventurism. The crown cut taxes on the rich as favors to powerful domestic allies. Soon, those allies were setting policy and trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.
Of course, this is not a direct metaphor. America circa 2006 != France circa 1789.
I mean, it's a bit hard to do something like the Tennis Court Oath with the NSA always watching...
I kid. Note how Bush plans to have things balanced by 2009. It'll never ever happen. My tongue is not in my cheek when I suggest the GOP will throw the 2008 election so a Democrat is forced to clean up their financial mess. That way, the 2010 and 2012 elections are all about how "The Democrats raised our taxes, yet we've slid further into debt!"
It's a gradual struggle to discredit the opposition while dismantling the social programs that allow their political base to subsist. On a vast enough scale of time, citizens will be born into a nation to which the New Deal is antithetical and authoritarian militarism is the norm.
One might even call it... The Long War.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 02:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 12, 2006
"Bid him whip / In kitchen cups concupiscent curds"
Some of these links are sorta stale. I kept on delaying a new post for one reason or another, and now I have to just to clear out all the memory Safari is taking up. Plus, well, I mean, OS X.4.4 is out. Gotta update, y'know?
- Ghulam Mustafa, Al'Qaida's man who knew too much, has been secreted away by the Pakistani government. via
- Christian Josefowicz, the geek who ran the Pentagon's propaganda war in Iraq. via
- The not-always-accurate-yet-one-rare-occasions-entirely-so RawStory.com claims the NSA has been spying on at least one domestic left-wing activist group. via
- Christiane Amanpour tapped?
But before you say "yeah, go for it," consider the implications of tapping Christiane Amanpour's phones:
1. Such a wiretap would likely include her home, office, and cell phones, and email correspondence, at the very least.
2. That means anyone Christiane has conversed with in the past four years, at least by phone or email, could have had their conversation taped by the US government.
3. That also means that anyone who uses any of Christiane's telephones or computers (work or home) could also have had their conversation bugged.
4. This includes Christiane's husband, former Clinton administration senior official Jamie Rubin, who was spokesman for the State Department.
5. Jamie Rubin was also chief foreign policy adviser to General Wesley Clark's presidential campaign, and then worked as a senior national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign.
6. Did Jamie Rubin ever use his home phone, his wife's work phone, his wife's cell phone, her home computer or her work computer to communicate with John Kerry or Wesley Clark? If so, those conversations would have been bugged if Bush was tapping Amanpour.
7. Did Jamie Rubin ever in the past four years communicate with any elected officials in Washington, DC - any Senators or members of the US House? Any senior members of the Democratic party?
8. Has Rubin spoken with Bill Clinton, his former boss, in the past 4 years?
Now you understand how potentially broad a violation of privacy the Bush doctrine on illegal domestic spying really is. Everyone who's anyone is a degree or two of separation away from a terrorist.
- Shiny. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is available on the web.
- Perhaps-apocryphal origin of balsamic vinegar:
My buddy is from Modena and his Aunt makes Balsamico and told us this story.
During WWII the owners of certain vinegar workshops fled their homes, leaving their vinegar - which was stored in balsamic wood casks - untouched for several years. Normally they would use the vinegar immediately. They noticed that the wood imparted a sweetness to the vinagar, and began to refine their manufacture based on how old the vinegar was, which is to say that every year the casks are decanted into smaller casks as the vinegar evaporates. It is stupid to buy anything older than 8 or 12 year old Balsamico.
- Daryl Lease gives advice to Congressional bribe-takers. via
"I'd like to welcome you to the first-ever meeting of Former Friends and Really, Really Distant Acquaintances of Jack Abramoff."
"Excuse me, but where's breakfast? I'm hungry."
"Well, a number of lobbyists did offer to cater our little gathering today, but under the circumstances -- "
"Are you telling me that we have to go out and buy our own food? That's outrageous!"
Grumbling. Sounds of chairs squeaking.
"I'm sorry, but it just didn't seem wise to accept any gifts from lobbyists right now."
"Look, I don't know who you are, but that's downright insulting! Like I'd trade a vote for breakfast! Dinner and drinks, maybe. But breakfast? C'mon!"
Bush had scored 10 points higher than DeLay in the Representative's district in 2004, and that was only after Bush had recorded a telephone message to help rally local Republicans. "I can't believe I had to do robocalls for him," the President said bitingly to an Oval Office visitor.
To people who know Bush well, the remark said it all about the longtime chill between the two pols—a distance that is only sure to grow with former lobbyist Jack Abramoff's guilty plea. Both camps describe the two conservative Texans' relationship as professional—an alliance, not a friendship. "DeLay admires Bush's leadership but still thinks of himself as the strongest conservative on the block," a DeLay friend says. "They perceive DeLay as a bull in a china shop. They appreciate him as their protector and retriever." Like many of his colleagues on Capitol Hill, DeLay suffers under what officials call this Administration's general lack of respect for Congress. But he is also in the unique position of being the most prominent modern Republican politician in Texas to rise without the help of White House senior adviser Karl Rove, and the two have never been close. "Karl thinks of him as someone a little bit too opinionated for his own good," says an official close to both men.
"And DeLay thinks of Karl as a former mail vendor, not some great guru."
Even before DeLay's announcement that he would abdicate his leadership post, top Bush advisers tell TIME, the President's inner circle always treated DeLay as a necessary burden. He may have had an unmatched grip on the House and Washington lobbyists, but DeLay is not the kind of guy—in background and temperament—the President feels comfortable with. Of the former exterminator, a Republican close to the President's inner circle says, "They have always seen him as beneath them, more blue collar. He's seen as a useful servant, not someone you would want to vacation with."
- Lumox is like Lumines for OS X.
- MacGyver-esque Al'Qaida terrorist pranks terrorists from Ireland. The first line screams "this came from a .co.uk tabloid!"
A CONVICTED al-Qaida terrorist turned the tables on republican wind-up merchants at Maghaberry Prison - by terrifying them with a fake bomb!
Dissident republicans have blamed Algerian bomb maker 'Abbas Boutrab' for a major security alert at the jail last week.
They claim he handed one of them a vacuum flask and warned it would explode if he took his hand off it.
The republicans raised the alarm, alleging Boutrab had warned the flask contained a pressure switch that would trigger an explosion if released.
Jail sources claim batteries were strapped around the outside of the flask.
"They'd been winding him up for weeks and he was getting his own back on them.
"There was no bomb and no pressure switch or plate, but they fell for it and they're the laughing stock of the jail."
The republicans claimed Boutrab had taken revenge following an argument they had with him.
During his trial in Belfast, an FBI explosives expert told how Boutrab made a detonator using a capacitor from a disposable camera, tungsten wire and lead oxide.
He said that with potassium chlorate, sulphur and sugar, a device could be made that would bring down an airliner.
- Trippy halftone patterns in Photoshop. via
- How-To: make smoke bombs via
- Serenity's coming to HD-DVD. Oddly enough, both this and the link immediately above were on the digg.com frontpage at the same time. via
- PassMe2 for homebrew on the Nintendo DS
- Here's a great review of Electroplankton for the DS, a game I just got delivered an hour ago.
To be perfectly frank, I haven't had this much fun with a game in I don't know how long. This is the type of game your grandmother could play and love just as much as your 2 year old nephew could. It's appealing on so many levels that I literally could gush over it for weeks.
So here's my attempt at a review.
Electroplankton isn't so much a game, as it is a visual and tactile stimulant.
- AksMe: Mining accidents 101
- TV Mini HD is Miglia's new external USB 2.0 HDTV tuner for Macs. via
- WaPo considers Wallace Stevens via
- NYTimes gets an interview for Albert Hoffman's 100th birthday. via
- Planetary destinations in Corona Borealis, aka Ariadne's Crown aka Arianrhod's Spiral Castle
Posted by Jon Rubin at 04:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 06, 2006
"I think some of these people are trying too hard. I think that when the truck of anthrax comes, it's going to have UNITED WE STAND and a Bush-Cheney on the back."
Links.
I'll start with some light politics.
- Bloomberg's rebuttal of George Bush's claimed ignorance of Jack Abramoff has a great headline: Abramoff's 'Equal Money' Went Mostly to Republicans
- Jonathan Chait elaborates on Abramoff's Republican ties on the LATimes op-ed page:
Abramoff came into politics by way of the campus-based, student-run College Republicans, where he served with future party big shots such as Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist. While running the College Republicans, he said: "It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently."
The apotheosis of this mentality was something Republicans called the "K Street Project." The idea was that, once Republicans had won control of Congress in 1994, they would not permit the business lobbies centered on K Street in Washington to split their loyalties between the two parties, as they had always done. Henceforth they had to employ, and donate funds to, Republicans, mostly if not exclusively.
Abramoff was a key figure in this project. "It was my role to push the Republicans on K Street to be more helpful to the conservative movement," Abramoff recalled to Michael Crowley in a recent New York Times Magazine profile. Republicans concurred at the time.
"He is someone on our side," Tom DeLay's chief of staff, Ed Buckham, explained to National Journal magazine in 1995. "He has access to DeLay." DeLay once called Abramoff "one of my closest and dearest friends." Abramoff hired multiple DeLay staffers as lobbyists, and his assistant later went to work for Karl Rove.
Abramoff epitomized the new breed of partisan lobbyist who advanced the GOP cause even as he enriched himself. As Norquist enthused at the time: "What the Republicans need is 50 Jack Abramoffs. Then this becomes a different town."
- Abramoff was using Indian tribes' money to...pay for sniper lessons for far-right Israeli settlers? WTF?
- Stirling Newberry has a fascinating DailyKos post about the escalation of the resource wars:
The real tinderbox is not mechanisms, but control over the oil itself, and US attempts to keep nations that are oil holders vulnerable to US military pressure. Iran is getting attention now, but it is not a state which is on the verge of violence. The middle east may be a tinderbox, but the core of this tinderbox is, of course Iraq. Had Saddam been in power, we would currently be dealing with a containment problem - higher energy prices make it harder to keep a dictator locked out of prosperity. As it is we have created a failed state, with a series of parties jocking for creating an oligarchic state with their party at the apex. This means that Iraqis are going to be going broke during an oil boom, as parties cut off oil development, in the hopes of getting enough tinder dry enough to kindle the fire of open chaos.
But Iraq is merely going to be the most visible flash point, the one which we hear of, but are carefully not shown. Around the world there are going to be increasingly violent and widespread agitations, as many countries will be forced to raise energy prices - almost universally subsidized so that people can have access to mechanization and the freedom it btrings - and thus being forcing people on the margins out of affluence. These people will not take it lying down.
This is going to be basically invisible to the US public, which will be pressing to make matters worse. There is an entire generation that wants to retire - that means a very high pressure to keep housing prices high for just a bit longer, so they can hit 30 years and retire. It means increasing pressures for protectionism, so they can keep their high paying position for a bit longer, hit thirty and keep their pension. There is going to be increasing pressure to close the borders, as the disorganized working class - used to the fat years of the housing boom - suddenly finds that jobs are getting harder to come buy for the pickup truck set.
The US is also going to experience a short term upward movement in stocks, as the huge volume of money looking for a home comes to rest here. The more uncertainty out there, the more people flee to the safety of the US. However, because the underlying consumer demand is not there to provide profits at higher stock prices - this upward surge will both have a very hard ceiling and a relatively short life. While few are predicting a crash for '06 - it is not beyond reason for the Dow to turn in another losing year, and have inflation adjusted gains in stocks be zero.
This will add to the pressure to allow cashing out from houses, and it this, in turn, will add to the pressure to keep rates lower than they should be, which will accelerate the inflationary building boom of capital in China where it won't cause inflation here directly - and therefore accelerate the resource tensions. This year is the year where conflict over resources breaks out into the public mind, because it is the year when flash point stand offs become common place.
- James Moore is on the no-fly watch list. Why? He wrote a critical biography of Karl Rove. via
- Informative Ask MetaFilter answers about post-Sharon Israel
- Rhode Island House overturns gubernatorial veto to become the 11th state to legalize medical marijuana via
- Using a quick TCL script and wget, a geek hacked together a quick and dirty way to datamine Amazon Wishlists in order to locate subversives. via
Now a little media...
Weezer will write a song, record it, and press it to disc. Then they'll re-write and re-record that same song, press it to a new disc, and take all the old discs off the market. Don't believe me? They've done it. They keep doing it. And if Cuomo has his way, you'll never know any better.
- Reno 911: the movie via
- Joss Whedon predicts the future... of television: via
The networks will all be creating exciting, innovative new spin-offs of today's shows. Approximately 67 percent of all television will be CSI-based, including CSI: Des Moines, CSI: New York but a Different Part than Gary Sinise Is In and NCSI: SVU WKRP, which covers every possible gruesome crime with a groovin' '70s beat. (Jerry Bruckheimer will also have conquered Broadway with the CSI musical "FOLLICLE!" starring Nathan Lane as a frenetic but lovable blood spatter and Matthew Broderick as lint.)
Lost has that one-of-a-kind alchemy that really can't be copied. Therefore, look for the original series Misplaced, as well as Unfound, Not So Much with the Whereabouts and Just Pull Over and Ask!
In a stunningly cost-effective move, CBS will air How I Met Your Biological Mother, That Bitch, which is just old episodes of How I Met Your Mother with snarkier narration. HBO's Westminster will continue the trend pioneered by Deadwood and Rome by making 19th-century England really dirty and weird, like Jane Austen with Tourette's. (Actually, I can't wait for that one.) Also, the constant slew of cable mergers will result in the creation of CinePax, a channel that's just very confused about its morals.
TVGuide.com: Speaking of Curb, what does the future hold? Some fans came away from the recent season finale thinking it might be a series finale.
Hines: I know.... Well, I think we're waiting to see what's going to happen, because Larry hasn't decided if he's coming back or not. It's up in the air.
- EyeBud == video iPod HUD for watching big-screen movies on what looks like a 105" display that's 12' away. via
- Burkhard Heim's theoretical propulsion method for spacecraft must have been the inspiration for the Vorlon, Minbari, and Centauri ships in Babylon 5: via
The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today's New Scientist magazine.
The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.
Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.
- Compare with JMS's words on gravity drives in B5:
Some races, like the Centauri and the Minbari, use drive systems built to varying degrees on magnetic and gravitational forces; some of them don't so much go to a planet as create a situation where they are drawn toward it. One of the side effects of this is a field allowing for artificial gravity. Earth doesn't have this level of technology, however.
...and that pretty much moves me to tech and assorted random stuff.
- Wikipedia on Burkhard Heim's theory, quantum gravity, and quintessence
- Ping Tunnel is a nifty utility to send TCP traffic over ICMP. via
- Useful site to compare viewable area on standard 4:3 and widescreen 16:9 TV sets. Helpful when looking for widescreen TVs that will display a 4:3 picture as large as your current 4:3 TV does.
- Chill trance mp3s from Cloud Factory via
- How to cook the perfect steak and the undoing of how to cook the perfect steak via
- Mentos + Coca-Cola = Asplosion!
- Origin of "coat of arms": via
Incidentally, although today we use "coat of arms" to mean a family insignia, the original meaning was very literal. A "coat of arms" was a linen or silk coat, worn by a knight to protect his armor from dirt and rust, and decorated with his personal or family heraldic emblem.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 05:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 20, 2005
"A dreamer with one eye open..."
I had a nice stream of daily posts flowing for awhile there. As you might have guessed, I turned 23 on Saturday. Between that and being in Fort Lauderdale all weekend, I didn't have much of a chance to web surf. But lemme empty my pockets...
- David Brin on that always-difficult-to-discern gap between empathy and sympathy:
Someone on the philanthropy discussion group raised an interesting question of “what does satiation mean?” Is it an end to ambitious desire and endeavor? Or merely a process by which the satisfaction of one goal allows a flexible human being to reprogram desire, and shift endeavor toward new goals?
Clearly, what needs inclusion is the notion of ambition as an essential human characteristic. In which case satiation would not mean an end to desire... at least not in a vigorous descendant of gregarious apes!
Here is an attempt to chart the process:
Satiability + extended surfeit => satiation
Satiation + extended horizons => fresh desires and worries that shift to other farther-ranging concerns.
In order to illustrate the point, here's one of my favorite metaphors. Go back in time, to the Neolithic Era, and ask our wisest ancestor what she would wish for her descendants. Her answer?
"No more fear of large predators, plus all the fats, sugars, salt, carbs and alcohol they could ever want."
Could she have imagined it coming as true as thoroughly most of us have it today? To her, it would seem we live in paradise, albeit a noisy and confusing one. Yet, we are troubled by insatiability for these ancient appetites, living at a time when fat and sugar etc are in surfeit! So... in order to stay healthy... many of us run for exercise... or for fun! Another unimaginable. Nobody said that satiation was easy.
Here's another, related connection. Empathy is NOT the same thing as sympathy.
Empathy is the power to understand the thoughts and feelings of others. It is a pragmatic tool that is needed by hunters, like tigers, who must try to think like their prey. Empathy is frightening when it is set in a fierce, zero sum game.
But in a surfeit? Amid positive-sum games? When appetites are satisfied and fear is low?
satiation + empathy => sympathy.
Your ancestors, upon hearing of dolphins stranded on a beach, would have run toward them. As YOU would, today, upon hearing the same news.
Only with very different intent. Think about that.
- The extent of the Bush administration's criminality sure exploded over the weekend.
- But another criminal aspect, rendition, goes back decades, according to Colin Powell. via
- I don't usually read the Huffington Post, but this post about Cheney's jaunt to Baghdad is revealing: via
The U.S. administration has maintained (since the last elections) that Iraq is a sovereign nation. But if a country is sovereign, presumably that country has the authority to decide who is allowed to visit, and when. And if a country is sovereign, normally that country's leaders would be aware of a senior foreign official's plans to drop in for a tour or a chat. Not Iraq. It's all about security, the U.S. says, but it's surely a little insulting to Iraqis to suggest that we can't even trust their Prime Minister, and certainly far more insulting to the sovereignty of a nation when U.S. officials feel they can come and go as they please, not only without visas, but without even letting their hosts know.
Another interesting tidbit is what Mr. Cheney, according to Reuters, said to reporters when in Baghdad: "I'm delighted to have the opportunity to spend some time today to look at the situation in Iraq, finding out on the ground how it feels, especially after the tremendous elections we had." (Emphasis mine.) I was not aware that Mr. Cheney held Iraqi citizenship.
- Acclaimed glassblower Chihuly at heart of intellectual property dispute. Chihuly lost an eye years ago, and ever since he doesn't blow glass himself as much as direct a team of artisans. One of those artisans decided to start making identical knockoffs of Chihuly pieces. Can Chihuly really own the studio glass technique? The last line of the quote below uses a poorly-chosen turn of phrase that must be like a poke with a sharp stick to ol' Dale Chihuly hisself, eh? via
But even if Chihuly's lawyers list specific works, which they are expected to do, "substantial similarity" is a difficult concept. Particularly for someone like Chihuly, who has had enormous influence on the world of art glass.
"What counts as influence?" Professor Kingsbury asked. "When is something actually a quotation?"
Legal experts say if one work of art shows the influence of another artist, that isn't copyright infringement. In other words, you can paint something in the style of Picasso without infringing on his rights.
It's the reason we have a Surrealist school of art, an Impressionist school and so on.
But even if the works look alike, it's not necessarily a slam-dunk.
For example, in 2003 a California court was asked to decide a case involving two works of art, both consisting of a realistic glass jellyfish encased in a clear, tapered glass "shroud." They were virtually identical to the eye. Nonetheless, the court ruled it was not copyright infringement. The first artist couldn't have a copyright on the way jellyfish look. And the glass "shroud" was a well-established technique in glass art.
Chihuly might run into a similar hurdle. Many of his works are inspired by things in the real world — Native American blankets, baskets, sea life. You can't claim a copyright to an idea, said attorney Melvyn Simburg, who specializes in this area.
"A concept is not protectible," he said. "Anybody else can be inspired by a basket or a textile."
And just like there are certain chord progressions that are common to a lot of music, and certain plot devices that are common to many plays, glass has similar characteristics that cannot be copyrighted, Simburg said.
"Plaintiffs do not have copyrights ... over the effect of gravity," the defendants argue in court papers. Chihuly "is seeking to corner the market on an undefined glass aesthetic."
But glass art expert Traver and Chihuly's lawyer say that once the works are compared, it will be obvious that Chihuly was wronged.
"Anybody with an eye can see this is a direct copy of what Dale has done over the years," Traver said.
- The future is here: Topless Sandals via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)
December 09, 2005
~Little girl guide, why don't you stop your crying?~
A quick one...
Since I stopped following your career shortly after you stopped going on stage wearing a tool belt with cable wrapped around your neck (around your appearance at "Laffs 'n' Food" in Enid, Oklahoma Aug 23-26 1999?) I said I wasn't aware of the article. They went on to tell me that you said basically (and I am not quoting but paraphrasing their recall) that I could kiss your ass, that I've never been to one of your shows (true) and that I didn't know your audience (untrue).
SO, I went and got your book, "Gitting-R-Donned", and excitedly skimmed past the joke about that one time you farted and something farty happened, on past the thing about the fat girl who farted and finally found it, . Well, needless to say I farted. I farted up a fartstorm right there in the Flyin' J Travel Center. I fartingly bought the book and took it home with an excitement I haven't experienced since I got Bertha Chudfarter's Grandma drunk and she took her teeth out and blew me as I was finger banging her while wearing a Jesus sock puppet in the back of the boiler room at The Church of the Redeemer off I-20 (I don't care who you are, that's funny.)
Okay Larry The Cable Guy, I will ignore the irony of a big ole southern redneck character actually using "inbred" as an insult, as well as the fact that a shekel is currency from Israel, the towel heads sworn enemy. But at least you're passionate about what you see as inhumane injustice (not on a global level of course, but on a national level) and the simple black and white of what's right and what's wrong. It's kinda like you're this guy who speaks for all these poor, unfortunate souls out there who wear shirts with blue collars on them, work hard all day to put food on the table for their family (unlike people who wear shirts with white collars or wear scrubs or t-shirts or dresses or costumes that consist of flannel shirts with the sleeves cut-off and old trucker hats) and pray to the American Flag of Jesus to protect them from the evils of muslims, queers, illegal immigrants, and the liberal jews who run Hollywood and the media. I guess one could say that you're "telling it like it is".
But you also specifically dumb down your speech while making hundreds of purposefully grammatical errors. How do I know this? It's on page 17 of your book wherein you describe how you would "Larry" up your commentaries for radio. What does it mean to "Larry" something up? Take a wild guess. The reason you feel the need to "Larry" something up? Because you are not that dumb. I mean you, Dan Whitney, the guy who's name the bank account is under. You were born and raised in Nebraska (hardly The South), went to private school and moved to Florida when you were 16. This is when you developed your accent?! Not exactly the developmental years are they? At age 16 that's the kind of thing you have to make a concerted effort to adopt. Did you hire a voice coach? Or were you like one of those people who go to England for a week and come back sounding like an extra from "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels"? As you said yourself in an interview once, "I can pop in and out of it pretty much whenever I want". In your book on page 89 you say in reference to the "gee-shucks" millionaire comment, "...see, to his (David's) mind, bein' well paid means I'm no longer real and I can't be a country boy anymore. It's just an act." Hey, it's always been an act! That's my fucking point! You admit it yourself so cut the indignation shit. And I am in no way deriding your work ethic. You clearly have more fart jokes than most and for that I applaud you. You go on to talk about how hard you work and life on the road and living on Waffle House and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I get it, we’ve all been there and played shitty, degrading gigs and sacrificed etc, etc. Then you say, "...this (the personal attack) was different because David basically hammered my fans in that RS article by implying that they were ignorant. He crossed the line when he railed against them, so I had to tell ya what I felt about that. He can hammer me all he wants, but when he screwed with my fans, it was time for me to say something." Aww, that's so sweet and egregious. I can't stand that fan ass kissing bullshit. You and Dane Cook ought to get together and have a "my-fan's-are-the-greatest-people-on-earth-and-that's-why-I-do-this" off. You could both sell a shit load of merch too.
The Serb army manual on their BZ munitions implies a violent reaction: “it can be expected that such individuals or groups will subsequently, under the effects of [this chemical agent], inflict great damage and losses on their own forces”
Over a hundred thousand pounds of BZ were produced by the US. However, it fell out of favor because its effects were considered to be too unpredictable. Destruction of the BZ stockpile commenced in 1988 and was reportedly completed in Pine Bluff in 1990.
Could any be in Iraq? In 1995, the British reported that Iraq had produced Agent 15, similar or identical to BZ, and possessed ‘large stocks’ of it. A later CIA report discounts this and concludes that “Iraq never went beyond research with Agent 15—a hallucinogenic chemical similar to BZ—or any other psychochemical.” The British do not agree and as of the last updated in 2004, the MoD maintains its claim. This would appear to be the most likely source of any insurgent supplies.
I did not initially take the report from The Green Side too seriously. Posted in the form of letters home from a Marine to his Dad, it looked like just keeping in touch with the folks at home and recording a piece of personal history, not an intel report. But the blog turns out to be the work of Lt Col Dave Bellon (right), not just another Marine but intelligence officer for the First Regimental Combat Team. The blog can no longer be easily accessed as it has now disappeared behind a USMC security screen.
Given Lt Col Bellon’s access to inside information, his rather specific claim about BZ becomes more serious. Other US sources do not mention BZ by name but do describe drug use by insurgents.
- WPA Wi-Fi encryption cracked, Mac WPA-cracking tool already available
- How-To: make ballistics gel
- Mel Sembler runs the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Fund. As anyone familiar with the Semblers is aware, Mel is a long-time crony supporter of Dick Cheney, and my assumption is he must be doing this on Dick's behalf. Plus, a quote that's a lot funnier to anyone who went to Shorecrest Preparatory School at the turn of the millennium: via
In 2000, Sembler said in an interview that he felt vindicated and "ecstatic" when George W. Bush made Cheney his running mate.
- Ask MetaFilter tries to explain Bush's somewhat recently affected and much-parodied jaw clench/eye squint maneuver.
Looking at this movie, it's a tic, but it's not pathological. Lots of folks have mild little tics like this.
That said, if you crank someone up on L-dopa, cocaine, amphetamine, or whatever your stimulant du jour is, you can see jaw, mouth, tongue, and lip movements like this; in their florid form they are much more pronounced. These are called 'extrapyramidal movements' because of their origin outside the pyramidal tracts of your brain's motor system.
You can also see them in folks who have been treated with tranquilizers that antagonize the action of dopamine, after those drugs have been withdrawn. This idiosyncratic reaction is called 'tardive dyskinesia' and the specific mouth movements that are invariably seen given various names like 'orobuccolingual dyskinesias'.
Again, Mr Bush's tic is pretty mild and stereotyped and I doubt it's pathological.
posted by ikkyu2 at 9:32 PM PST on December 7 [!]
- Light Fingers is a candy raver toy that puts LEDs on your fingertips. via
- ntop, of course, is top for your network.
- In this modern classic film quote, Quentin Tarantino performs a valid and self-consistent explication of Top Gun. via
SID: You want subversion on a massive level. You know what one of the greatest fucking scripts ever written in the history of Hollywood is? Top Gun.
DUANE: Oh, come on.
SID: Top Gun is fucking great. What is Top Gun? You think it's a story about a bunch of fighter pilots.
DUANE: It's about a bunch of guys waving their dicks around.
SID: It is a story about a man's struggle with his own homosexuality. It is! That is what Top Gun is about, man. You've got Maverick, all right? He's on the edge, man. He's right on the fucking line, all right? And you've got Iceman, and all his crew. They're gay, they represent the gay man, all right? And they're saying, go, go the gay way, go the gay way. He could go both ways.
DUANE: What about Kelly McGillis?
SID: Kelly McGillis, she's heterosexuality.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)
October 27, 2005
"A race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality" —E. A Squared
I should really post more stuff. I've got all these links just sitting here on my screen...
- Colonel Wilkerson's unbelievably frank speech in its entirety
The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda…or we could take a bolder approach.
- Stratfor: Why Plame Matters
- Dubious USNews rumor that Cheney will resign over Plame probe.
- Hunter over at DailyKos analyzed the NYTimes coverage of Judy Miller and found a bunch of tasty tidbits.
QUESTION: Thanks. Is it true that the President slapped Karl Rove upside the head a couple of years ago over the CIA leak?
SCOTT McCLELLAN: Are you referring to, what, a New York Daily News report? Two things: One, we're not commenting on an ongoing investigation; two, and I would challenge the overall accuracy of that news account.
QUESTION: That's a comment.
QUESTION: Which part of it?
QUESTION: Yes, that is.
QUESTION: Which facts --
SCOTT McCLELLAN: No, I'm just saying -- no, I'm just trying to help you all.
QUESTION: So what facts are you challenging?
SCOTT McCLELLAN: Again, I'm not going to comment on an ongoing investigation.
QUESTION: 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. (Laughter.)
- TalkLeft tries to predict how strict the sentencing will be.
- Fitzgerald is widening his scope to cover other misuses of classified data in the Bush administration and has launched a website.
- A new piece on the Plunge Protection Team
"When I saw the actual sculpture, I had quite a shock," said Ocneanu. "I never imagined the play of light on the surfaces. There are subtle optical effects that you can feel but can't quite put your finger on." The sculpture has significance in several areas of mathematics related to the study of symmetry, and it can represent structures that are fundamental to many branches of mathematics and physics.
"The sculpture is a new way to represent a classical mathematical object," said Nigel Higson, head of the Penn State Department of Mathematics. "For professionals the sculpture is very rich in meaning, but it also has an aesthetic appeal that anyone can appreciate. In addition, it helps to start conversations about abstract mathematical concepts -- something that is generally hard to do with anyone other than another expert."
The subject of the projection is a regular 4-dimensional solid of intermediate complexity, which Ocneanu calls an "octacube." It has 24 vertices, 96 edges and 96 triangular faces, which enclose 24 three-dimensional "rooms." Windows cut in faces allow the viewer to see within the structure, the same way that a window in a cubic room opens to the inside of the cube. Physically, the sculpture is a giant puzzle of 96 triangular pieces cut from stainless steel and bent into spherical shape.
- The New Yorker does excellent profiles of comedians. For example, Sarah Silverman:
The persona she has crafted is strangely Pollyanna-ish and utterly absorbed in her own point of view: “I wear this St. Christopher medal sometimes because—I’m Jewish, but my boyfriend is Catholic—it was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn’t burn through my skin it will protect me.” In another of her bits, she invokes the events of September 11th: “They were devastating. They were beyond devastating. I don’t want to say especially for these people, or especially for these people, but especially for me, because it happened to be the same exact day that I found out that the soy chai latte was, like, nine hundred calories. I had been drinking them every day. You hear soy, you think healthy. And it’s a lie.” Her constructions are minimal but the turn is sharp. “I was raped by a doctor,” she says. “Which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.”
The Greeks believed in an earth-centric universe and accounted for celestial bodies' motions using elaborate models based on epicycles, in which each body describes a circle (the epicycle) around a point that itself moves in a circle around the earth. Mr Wright found evidence that the Antikythera mechanism would have been able to reproduce the motions of the sun and moon accurately, using an epicyclic model devised by Hipparchus, and of the planets Mercury and Venus, using an epicyclic model derived by Apollonius of Perga. (These models, which predate the mechanism, were subsequently incorporated into the work of Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD.)
A device that just modelled the motions of the sun, moon, Mercury and Venus does not make much sense. But if an upper layer of mechanism had been built, and lost, these extra gears could have modelled the motions of the three other planets known at the time—Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. In other words, the device may have been able to predict the positions of the known celestial bodies for any given date with a respectable degree of accuracy, using bronze pointers on a circular dial with the constellations of the zodiac running round its edge.
Mr Wright devised a putative model in which the mechanisms for each celestial body stack up like layers in a sandwich, and started building it in his workshop. The completed reconstruction, details of which appeared in an article in the Horological Journal in May, went on display this week at Technopolis, a museum in Athens. By winding a knob on the side, celestial bodies can be made to advance and retreat so that their positions on any chosen date can be determined. Mr Wright says his device could have been built using ancient tools because the ancient Greeks had saws whose teeth were cut using v-shaped files—a task that is similar to the cutting of teeth on a gear wheel. He has even made several examples by hand.
- NASA's got a video of the first 21 named storms of 2005.
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use
:-(
- Picotux is the world's smallest Linux computer. It's basically a serial port and an ethernet port and a chip.
- A Plame-inspired Ask MetaFilter question ("What do spies tell their families?") garnered this amazing anecdote from dobbs:
I dated a Russian spy once. I didn't know she was a spy or, for that matter, Russian. She passed herself off as French Canadian by way of Germany. She worked in an insurance company here in Toronto and was, she told me, separated from her husband (who I had met). He worked at a large camera retailer in Canada (Black's).
One night around midnight I was visited by CSIS (Canadian FBI) and "interogated" about my relationship with the woman (her "name" was Laurie Lambert)--the agent refused to tell me why she was being investigated or how CSIS knew that I was "connected" to the woman (I hadn't seen her in 2 years I think).
Turns out that both her and her 'husband' were spies and that they had taken their names from dead French Canadian siblings (I found all this out later from the newspaper). At the time they were apprehended, I believe she was engaged (or at least in a serious relationship) with a Toronto-based doctor who, of course, had no idea about her real background.
So, though I don't have a definitive answer for you, in my experience spies tell no one, including those close to them, that they are spies. As the CSIS agent told me on her way out of my house, 'No one is who they claim to be. People just lie to different degrees.'
posted by dobbs at 10:45 AM PST on October 16 [!]
Okay, at least I cleared out all my serious links, and half the fun ones...
Posted by Jon Rubin at 04:24 PM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2005
~Expect the best / Accept the worst~ —Jawbreaker
So there's been, a, well, a dearth of posts lately. Dunno if that's going to change anytime soon. But it's been 25+ days since my computer rebooted and Safari is getting downright laggardly.
There were no donkeys in Qian until someone who was fond of curiosities brought one in by boat. After the man got it there, he found the donkey was useless, so he let it loose near the hills. A tiger, upon seeing it, thought it was such a large beast that it took it for a god. So the tiger hid in the forest to spy on it. Bit by bit the tiger came closer to it, but carefully so that it wouldn't know.
One day the donkey brayed, and the tiger was so terrified that he ran far off. He thought that the donkey was going to eat him and was extremely frightened. Yet as the tiger kept observing it time and again, he realized there wasn't anything unusual about the donkey. The tiger had gotten increasingly used to hearing the braying. He now came out near the donkey circling it, but still dared not pounce. In a little while, he pressed even closer to it, and he nudged it unconcernedly. Overcome with rage, the donkey kicked out at the tiger.
Now the tiger happily reckoned to himself, "So this is the extent of its talents." Thereupon he leaped, roaring loudly, and ripped open the donkey's throat. He ate his fill and then left.
- Well, Serenity did not do spectacularly. I liked it. But then, of course I would. It did, however, garner a fawning New York Times review:
It probably isn't fair to Joss Whedon's "Serenity" to say that this unassuming science-fiction adventure is superior in almost every respect to George Lucas's aggressively more ambitious "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith." But who cares about fair when there is fun to be had? Scene for scene, "Serenity" is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of Mr. Lucas's recent screen entertainments. Mr. Whedon isn't aiming to conquer the pop-culture universe with a branded mythology; he just wants us to hitch a ride to a galaxy far, far away and have a good time. The journey is the message, not him.
- Whedon's got a new fantasy thriller in the works called Goners. He found the time to drop a stock, self-deprecating piece of wit:
"Directing a film was as exciting and daunting as it was supposed to be," said the CAA-repped Whedon. "I learned a lot on 'Serenity' and hope I hid that from the audience."
- Loni Peristere, Zoic's frontman, dished about Serenity's VFX:
The lead animators on Serenity are attentive and usually get Joss' vision in a few takes. I also think because of television and Joss' must-do mentality, we just figure it out. On "Buffy" we never had time or money, but we always found a way. On Serenity we used this must-do mentality with the best crew imaginable. Jack Green and Dan Sudick were there to make it work. We were constantly challenging ourselves with what could be done. The hovercraft chase is a great example. As scripted, it read like a three-week shoot, with heavy CG. We didn't have that, but we had the scene. So we cooperated and problem-solved the sequence to what it eventually became. A practical cowboy and Indians chase, with a bit of wire removal and some terrain replacement. We were only able to do this by using the unique talents of our crew to overcome safety, aesthetic, and schedule restrictions. Joss finished the story beats in two days, I cleaned up the action over the next two, with a third aerial day. We did it in one week. We also shot the plan, as there was no room or budget for improvement. And yet because we were shooting the actors on the craft, they could improve and Joss could follow them.
Just wait until we have a little money.
- Time.com even got Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman to do an interview together. This provided a public service, as those two had never held a conversation before.
JW: I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.
NG: Yes. It really is this thing of executives loving the smell of their own urine and urinating on things. And then more execs come in, and they urinate. And then the next round. By the end, they have this thing which just smells like pee, and nobody likes it.
JW: There's really no better way to put it.
TIME: Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is out this month as well, making it effectively national Goth month.
NG: We are Goth icons. Joss and I. We don't have to be Goths, because we are Goth icons.
JW: I'm low on mascara. It's weird. I've made my bones with vampires, but I've never really associated anything I did with Goth that much, except that I've kind of made fun of them.
- Tony Blair's forty billion pound Saudi arms deal:
Defence, diplomatic and legal sources say negotiations are stalling because the Saudis are demanding three favours. These are that Britain should expel two anti-Saudi dissidents, Saad al-Faqih and Mohammed al-Masari; that British Airways should resume flights to Riyadh, currently cancelled through terrorism fears; and that a corruption investigation implicating the Saudi ruling family and BAE should be dropped. Crown prince Sultan's son-in-law, Prince Turki bin Nasr, is at the centre of a "slush fund" investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.
- That Atlanta hostage crisis from March was resolved with meth.
- I could barely believe my eyes when I read about Bush-the-conservationist.
Two other points I want to make is, one, we can all pitch in by using -- by being better conservers of energy. I mean, people just need to recognize that the storms have caused disruption and that if they're able to maybe not drive when they -- on a trip that's not essential, that would helpful. The federal government can help, and I've directed the federal agencies nationwide -- and here's some ways we can help. We can curtail nonessential travel. If it makes sense for the citizen out there to curtail nonessential travel, it darn sure makes sense for federal employees. We can encourage employees to carpool or use mass transit. And we can shift peak electricity use to off-peak hours. There's ways for the federal government to lead when it comes to conservation.
- Miers, Bush's new SCOTUS nominee, used to give Bush his Presidential Daily Briefing. As in, 8/6/2001's briefing, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
- I knew things were getting fun politically when Kos sounded the divers alarums:
The trifecta is complete. The Republican leadership in the Senate, House and White House are ALL officially under investigation.
- The Jack Abramoff investigation keeps on dancing around the Executive branch: via
Tyco -- whose executive L. Dennis Kozlowski had just departed under an ethics cloud -- was worried that the Bush administration might embrace legislation promoted by Democrats that would impose higher taxes on domestic-centered companies that had moved offshore to cut their tax bills. The legislation was motivated by popular anger over such offshore moves, and carried the additional penalty of barring such firms from receiving federal contracts.
Lobbying disclosure statements filed by Abramoff listing his work for Tyco cite the "Executive Office of the President" as one of his lobbying targets on the tax and contracts issues. Others were the Department of Commerce, the General Services Administration and Congress. Greenberg Traurig records submitted to Tyco describe specific contacts with the White House legislative office, a source familiar with the matter said yesterday.
Rove's personal assistant at the time, Susan Ralston, formerly worked as Abramoff's secretary. It could not be learned yesterday whether she was among those contacted by any of the 14-person Greenberg team recorded as working on the Tyco account.
- New memos show DeLay had hands-on control of his PAC.
- And of course now DeLay's indictment(s) is(are) old news.
Sigils, servitors and god-forms are three magickal techniques that chaos magicians use to actualize magickal intentions. Sigils are magickal spells developed and activated to achieve a specific, fairly well defined and often limited end. Servitors are entities created by a magician and charged with certain functions. Godforms are complex belief structures, often held by a number of people, with which a magician interacts in order to actualize fairly broad magickal intentions. These three techniques are not quite as distinct as these definitions would suggest, they tend to blur into one another. The purpose of this essay is to explain these magickal tools, indicate their appropriateness for different types of magickal intentions, and show how these tools relate to the general theories of chaos magick and of Dzog Chen, a form of Tibetan Buddhism.
- CBS calls it likes they sees it: Undeclared civil war in Iraq.
At a news conference with a U.S. ambassador, a prominent Sunni politician shouted that the mostly Shiite police force was behind many of the killings -- a charge the police deny.
And the killing isn't one-sided. An ambush in a western Baghdad suburb last month began with the execution of an entire Shiite family inside their home.
CBS News was shown a pamphlet by a young man too afraid to reveal his face. It's an order for all Shiites to leave his neighborhood, or be killed -- given to him in broad daylight by masked terrorists. The man said if he did not leave, he will die.
The police did nothing, so within days, a powerful Shiite militia struck back at the terrorists, raiding the same neighborhood. In much of Iraq, armed factions like this one operate beyond the law.
- Jewel of a MetaFilter post on Italo Calvino
He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.
- Showtime's series Weeds used a song I recognized from an RJD2 sample, Marion Black's "Who Knows."
- Xaes is a nifty little crypto engine for OS X.
- Prince Saud al-Faisal has been warning all those with ears to hear that Iraq cannot hold.
Prince Saud said he met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week and added that American officials generally responded to his warnings by telling him that the United States successfully carried off the Iraqi elections and "they say the same things about the constitution" and the broader situation in Iraq now. On Thursday, in fact, the senior administration official said, "The forward movement of the political process is the best answer."
Prince Saud argued: "But what I am trying do is say that unless something is done to bring Iraqis together, elections alone won't do it. A constitution alone won't do it." Prince Saud is a son of the late King Faisal and has been foreign minister for 30 years.
- Ten billion dollars worth of stolen Incan treasure have been located. Cool, huh? Even better: the treasure was found buried on Robinson Crusoe island, where shipwrecked Alexander Selkirk survived on his own for four years. Better yet: the loot was found by a robot named "Arturito." Alas, no word on whether the plunder was in a hatch marked 4-8-15-16-23-42.
- Medieval Macabre: Supernatural and Fantastic Imagery of the Middle Ages
Archeologists have long and often times looked for evidence of Odysseus on modern Ithaca, but never found anything significant from the Bronze Age. This led many scholars to dismiss Homer’s version of Ionian island geography as strictly a literary creation.
But two pieces of fairly recent evidence suggest archeologists were looking in the wrong place. In 1991, a tomb of the type used to bury ancient Greek royalty was found near the hamlet of Tzannata in the hills outside Poros. It is the largest such tomb in northeastern Greece, with remains of at least 72 persons found in its stone niches.
One find there is particularly telling. In Book XIX of the “Odyssey,” the just-returned and still disguised Odysseus tells his wife (who may or may not realize who she’s talking to; Homer is deliberately ambivalent) that he encountered Odysseus many years earlier on the island of Crete. He describes in detail a gold brooch the king wore on that occasion.
A gold brooch meeting that precise description lies now in the archeological museum at Argostoli, the main city on Kefalonia, 30 miles across the island from Poros. Other gold jewelry and seals carved in precious stones excavated from the tomb offer further proof the grave outside Poros was used to bury kings.
Greek archeologists also found sections of ancient city walls extending for miles through the hills around and well beyond Poros. These surround both the village and a steep adjacent hill which bears evidence it once served as an acropolis, what the Greeks called hilltop forts in most of their major cities. The stones of the walls date to about 1300 B.C., the approximate time of events described in the “Iliad” and “Odyssey.”
Most likely, the royal capital at Ithaca was a much larger city than Poros or any other town on either modern Ithaca or Kefalonia. It would have needed a major source of water. There is none on modern Ithaca, but streams abound near Poros, where there is also a small man-made lake. This area had the necessary water. The island now called Ithaca likely did not.
- There's a drum circle at Treasure Island beach.
The rhythms shift and swell, fade, rebuild, break down. Double time. Decrescendo. Layer upon layer weaving in and out, throbbing into a frenzy, spinning, colliding, subsiding, then returning to a familiar refrain.
"There's an intangible high, an almost meditative state you can get to," says Bill Keiser, a 49-year-old systems analyst from Tampa. "I leave here more ready to go back to work Monday morning."
What started as a college project has spiraled into something almost spiritual. Christine Jalbert, a 26-year-old modern dance student, began the circle with her belly-dancing friend Johanna Krynytzky. They invited six friends the first Sunday; the second week, they hung a few fliers.
"For my class, we were supposed to create something that would generate community and foster self-expression," says Jalbert, who had never drummed before. "I wanted to come up with an atmosphere where adults could let go without alcohol. It's really evolved into something much bigger."
At 9:10 p.m., 34 people are playing and at least that many more are listening. It's almost dark. A pregnant moon has parked overhead.
The faint light of a fishing boat slides along the horizon. A shooting star silently slips into the saltwater.
The drummers roll on, keeping time with the tide.
The earth's heartbeat echoes along the beach.
- Great, expansive interview with DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) by Erik Davis:
I can't say there's one formula to the structure of my sound, but there's definitely this sense of a syncopation of all these different layers of culture that move at different rhythms and tempos: African-American culture, academic culture, digital media. I love the word "syncopation." Syncope means a small gap in consciousness, and when you play with those gaps and make a mesh out of those presences and absences, that's a beat. Everything is about pulling together these disparate fragments.
I look at Burning Man as a postmodern carnival. I'm one of these kinds of guys who likes breaking down words, and carnival means -"carni-vale" - throwing the flesh, you know, being able to wear all these different masks and being able to switch identities. Afro-Caribbean culture and a lot of southern European culture is fascinated with carnival, with the festival of the saints. These are all neo-pagan eruptions that Christianity somehow absorbed. But when you apply that Dionysian search for some eruption of irrationality into a very regimented world… it's madness by normal standards.
I've kind of distanced myself from the psychology of psychedelic culture. I DJ'd at Burning Man last year and took some DMT. I felt much more disassociated than before. At the end of the day, that's what it's all about: the logic of things, you do A thus B happens or C happens. But psychedelic culture breaks those associative chains, and makes you feel like everything's without cause and just floating. When I did that heavy psychedelic at Burning Man, I actually felt like my brain had gone past the point of no return. I mean, everything's already fragmented, but it feels like if I touch this stuff ever again, my brain will just fly to pieces.
In general, I haven't done anything over the last year or so - I've had some coffee, some wine. The more I've actually pulled back from stuff, the more it feels like the entire planet is psychedelic -- like the geometry of a city seen from above, or seeing ocean waves just near the Mediterranean. Monaco looked like a Walt Disney recreation, but then you realize that Disney is just recreating that weird palace vibe. We live in a culture of relentless quotation. You see something, you absorb it, and it pops up unconsciously in your next thing. After the last time I did DMT at Burning Man, I felt like my brain became Time Square, a kind of boring, rushing collage of conflicting images and ideas, each one demanding its own time and space in my brain.
I think a lot of this stuff is psychologically corrosive. To get any work done, you can't think like that, because you're just outside of any notion of normal language and being able to communicate and deal with things. It takes a lot of psychological integrity to be able to balance between psychedelic culture and being able to maintain and build a normal world and still have that sense of overview. When you talk to some executive guy, they've got just a one-track mentality, because that's what allows them to do their thing. Anybody who wants to do something has to compress.
Once you've done X amount of some substance it actually remodels your perceptions, the architecture of how you experience stuff. You do the drugs and then the drugs do you. When you look at a computer screen, synaesthesia is just there on the surface, like when you touch it and you see little waves bubble away. There are special effects at every level and from every angle.
As an artist, I'm at a paradox, because part of me has that urge to trip. But there's always the sense that once you go past that point of no return, you're in a universe of one, because you're your own language structure, your own mentality. At the peak of any trip you sometimes feel this inability to have any sense of real language. That's what Burning Man felt like: that sense of linguistic loss, of not being able to enunciate normal words or the flows of how you would normally put sentences together. It's post-linguistic or something.
- The proof Tom Clancy is a poser, not a true war nerd, is that he hasn't exploited his riches to become the sovereign ruler of a third world country:
When that sort of indoor life gets dull, you could invest a little of the 200 million in hardware and start a little war of your own. You can get anything you want out there: T-72's are going for scrap-metal prices. People think tanks are useless, but that's way oversimplifying things. Tanks worked beautifully for the Serbs till the NATO airforces got involved. If you're fighting irregulars in a treeless landscape like the 'Stans, tanks work just fine.
So you buy some MBTs, some artillery, go in and just wipe out one of the local clans. That'll get the locals' attention. They love a winner. Make your own flag. Your own uniforms. Convert the whole place to some cool religion, dump that Islam nonsense: declare the first Zoroastrian jihad, rolling back the inroads of Islam, that imported flea-ridden Arabian cult. Or, I don't know, you could revive the old Egyptian gods. No, Zoroastrianism would be better. It's more local, and pretty cool too from what I've read.
Worshipping fire, leaving your dead on rooftops to be eaten by vultures. Think of the speeches you could make: "We are the Army of Flames, the Sacred Fire of Tadjikistan, and in Zoroaster's name we vow to burn across the steppes until all is cleansed and ashen!"
God damn, think of the possibilities! The CIA would love you: an anti-Muslim jihad! They'd need C-5A's to hold all the cash they'd send you!
A war like that is just a big pyramid scheme: you take a village and distribute the loot and the women to your men. Then you round up all the surviving men and boys from that village and offer them a simple choice: join us and be reimbursed with the loot and women from the next village we take, or die right now. It's a very effective sales pitch. Repeat until the whole Steppe is yours.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
August 14, 2005
~Duck and weave, I'm shedding light in their shadow box to make it empty.~
Jut some quickies.
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society where the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."
- Was Hunter S. Thompson's last written word a Biblical reference? via
The Scriptures [sic] relevance for Thompson flooded back as I stared at The Proud Highway and Bible in the bottom of the box. It reminded me of the mystery surrounding Thompson’s brief suicide note. Before shooting himself with a revolver, he had typed the single word “Counselor” in the center of a blank page. To date, fellow journalists and friends of Thompson have expressed confusion as to what the word might signify, comparing it to the mysterious “Rosebud” of Citizen Kane. And that’s when it hit me. I picked up the Bible and quickly scanned the Gospel of John. There it was in the 14th chapter.
- BoingBoing explores astroturfing the Wikipedia:
Reader Comment: Anonymous says,
I can't say who I am, but I do work at a company that uses Wikipedia as a key part of online marketing strategies. That includes planting of viral information in entries, modification of entries to point to new promotional sites or "leaks" embedded in entries to test diffusion of information. Wikipedia is just a more transparent version of Myspace as far as some companies are concerned. We love it (evil laugh).
Posted by Jon Rubin at 08:13 PM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2005
i can't think of anything to quote for a title
- There's been some news lately about the discovery of the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem. Except, the Pool of Siloam was discovered over a year ago.
- Mathew Gross reiterates that the Democrats need to get over their "politically stupid" fear of addressing the war in Iraq:
We'll repeat that tomorrow, just as we've repeated it since October of 2002, and we'll keep repeating it until the last damn Democrat who voted for this war retires from political life, which will probably be the next time we actually win the Presidency.
- Cruel but funny Wonkette sighting of Jenna Bush, whose friends call her "JB":
OK, I didn't really say anything til later, when there was a lull between songs, and I was about 30 feet away: "Hey Jenna, your father's a douchebag!" in my best loud-as-shit voice. Drunk liberal 1, First Daughter 0.
Real vanilla, as the makers of Coke understand, gives foods a certain je ne sais quoi. Its rich, multifaceted flavor derives in part from the careful hand-rearing the beans receive. The orchid that produces the pods is something of a diva, making vanilla one of the world's most labor-intensive crops. The finicky plant likes damp heat, steady rainfall, and a delicate balance of sunshine and shade. It takes its time—around two to three years—to produce an odorless, pale yellow flower that, unless pollinated, dies within hours. Pollination requires artificial insemination, a manual transfer of pollen from the male anther to the female stigma. (In Mexico, where vanilla originated, an indigenous bee pollinated the flowers; vanilla could not be grown elsewhere until a slave boy on the island of Reunion discovered how to pollinate the orchid in 1841.) The seed pods, like human children, take nine months to develop. But the green, string-beanlike pods become dark brown and fragrant only after a curing process that takes several months, a kind of spa treatment for vanilla beans. According to Rain, the pods are "wrapped in clothes and stored in boxes for hours to days, massaged, manipulated, laid in the sun to dry each morning and brought in to rest each evening." The entire cultivation process can take up to five years. Most of the world's vanilla is grown in Madagascar, Indonesia, Mexico, and Tahiti, where climate is right and land plentiful. Total production is small, around 2,000 metric tons a year, with demand historically exceeding supply. It's no wonder that vanilla is one of the most expensive.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 08:04 PM | Comments (0)
August 08, 2005
"I don't even know what gingham is, but she goes through about 10 rolls a week of that stuff."
- Kevin Kelly has a nifty think-piece in this month's Wired called "We Are the Web." It tracks the history of hypertext, and attempts to predict the web's future:
But if a roiling mess of participation is all we think the Web will become, we are likely to miss the big news, again. The experts are certainly missing it. The Pew Internet & American Life Project surveyed more than 1,200 professionals in 2004, asking them to predict the Net's next decade. One scenario earned agreement from two-thirds of the respondents: "As computing devices become embedded in everything from clothes to appliances to cars to phones, these networked devices will allow greater surveillance by governments and businesses." Another was affirmed by one-third: "By 2014, use of the Internet will increase the size of people's social networks far beyond what has traditionally been the case."
These are safe bets, but they fail to capture the Web's disruptive trajectory. The real transformation under way is more akin to what Sun's John Gage had in mind in 1988 when he famously said, "The network is the computer." He was talking about the company's vision of the thin-client desktop, but his phrase neatly sums up the destiny of the Web: As the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds.
Today, the Machine acts like a very large computer with top-level functions that operate at approximately the clock speed of an early PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, which essentially means network email runs at 1 megahertz. Same with Web searches. Instant messaging runs at 100 kilohertz, SMS at 1 kilohertz. The Machine's total external RAM is about 200 terabytes. In any one second, 10 terabits can be coursing through its backbone, and each year it generates nearly 20 exabytes of data. Its distributed "chip" spans 1 billion active PCs, which is approximately the number of transistors in one PC.
This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion "synapses" between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number - but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine is.
Since each of its "transistors" is itself a personal computer with a billion transistors running lower functions, the Machine is fractal. In total, it harnesses a quintillion transistors, expanding its complexity beyond that of a biological brain. It has already surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence as calculated by Ray Kurzweil. For this reason some researchers pursuing artificial intelligence have switched their bets to the Net as the computer most likely to think first. Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who once claimed he wanted to make an AI "that would be proud of me," has invented massively parallel supercomputers in part to advance us in that direction. He now believes the first real AI will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer like IBM's proposed 23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast digital tangle of the global Machine.
In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing.
Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine's internal workings will be so complex they won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.
One great advantage the Machine holds in this regard: It's always on. It is very hard to learn if you keep getting turned off, which is the fate of most computers. AI researchers rejoice when an adaptive learning program runs for days without crashing. The fetal Machine has been running continuously for at least 10 years (30 if you want to be picky). I am aware of no other machine - of any type - that has run that long with zero downtime. While portions may spin down due to power outages or cascading infections, the entire thing is unlikely to go quiet in the coming decade. It will be the most reliable gadget we have.
And the most universal. By 2015, desktop operating systems will be largely irrelevant. The Web will be the only OS worth coding for. It won't matter what device you use, as long as it runs on the Web OS. You will reach the same distributed computer whether you log on via phone, PDA, laptop, or HDTV.
In the 1990s, the big players called that convergence. They peddled the image of multiple kinds of signals entering our lives through one box - a box they hoped to control. By 2015 this image will be turned inside out. In reality, each device is a differently shaped window that peers into the global computer. Nothing converges. The Machine is an unbounded thing that will take a billion windows to glimpse even part of. It is what you'll see on the other side of any screen.
And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we're already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge.
The human brain has no department full of programming cells that configure the mind. Rather, brain cells program themselves simply by being used. Likewise, our questions program the Machine to answer questions. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or blog an item, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the Web OS, thereby programming the Machine by using it.
- "I'm so sick of arming the world, then sending troops over to destroy the fucking arms, you know what I mean?" In this case, Iran: via
Now comes word that Halliburton, which has a long history of flouting U.S. law by conducting business with countries the Bush administration said has ties to terrorism, was working with Cyrus Nasseri, the vice chairman of the board of directors of Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran’s largest private oil companies, on oil and natural gas development projects in Tehran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran’s nuclear development team and has been negotiating Iran's nuclear development issues with the European Union and at the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“Nasseri, a senior Iranian diplomat negotiating with Europe over Iran's controversial nuclear program is at the heart of deals with US energy companies to develop the country's oil industry,” the Financial Times reported.
- Arianna Huffington adds to the rumors about Judith Miller.
- It's not just for for the EU parliament anymore: Italy's Po River flush with cocaine. via
Ettore Zuccato, from the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, Italy, and colleagues tested a new tool to measure a cocaine residue called benzoylecgonine (BE), present in flowing river and sewage waters because it is excreted in the urine of cocaine users. The residue is a by-product of metabolism in the human body, and cannot be produced by other means. The researchers measured the levels of BE in the river Po and in the sewage water of medium-sized Italian cities. Their results show that the Po, the largest Italian river, with five million people living in its vicinity, steadily carried the equivalent of about 4 kg of cocaine per day. This would imply an average daily use of at least 27 doses of 100 mg of cocaine for every 1,000 young adults of 15 to 34 years of age – the main consumers of cocaine. In the Po valley, this would translate into a least 40,000 doses being used every day by young people. This number greatly exceeds official national estimates, according to which 15,000 young adults living in the Po valley admit to taking the drug at least once a month. The researchers' data from medium-sized Italian cities is consistent with the figures found in the Po valley.
- Early Visual Media is an online museum of the early history of photography and cinematics. via
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)
August 02, 2005
Mental note: when you have 30+ pages loaded in your aggregator, don't click the "open all windows in browser" button
- First of all, the most important story of the day, without a doubt, is Holy Shit Apple released a multi-button scrolling mouse. Ye, and the heavens did part, and the Lord did smile upon his creation. So Macs are using Pentium processors, Apple sells a five-button mouse with dual-axis scrolling...wtf's next? Is Steve Jobs going to appear in a puff of smoke during the Super Bowl and announce the NewtonXtreme, which solves the handwriting recognition problem by reading your brain waves? Is Avi Tevanian going to fly into MacWorld Expo in a hovercraft Segway and unveil a video iPod with no screen but a tiny, LED-based high definition projector? Maybe Woz's beard will gain sentience in a bizarre wireless networking experiment, take over the company, and start licensing Mac OS for free to "citizens of the world"?
- In other Apple news, ArsTechnica claims Sharp is going to supply the chips for the inevitable video iPod:
I couldn't resist passing along this bit of plausible but unverified information that I've received. It seems that some Sharp sales reps are bragging to potential customers that Apple will be using the Sharp LH7A400 SOC (system on a chip) in the initial version of the video iPod.
- Is Apple using Microsoft's Trusted Computing DRM package on Mac OS x86? via
However, comments by Casey, the most senior commander of coalition forces in Iraq, drew the most notice. He told reporters that a "fairly substantial" withdrawal of U.S. troops could go ahead in the spring and summer of 2006 if the Iraqi political process is not derailed and the insurgency does not grow.
- A few weeks back, Google stole one of Microsoft's top engineers. Now Redmond's struck back by getting an injunction, saying the guy broke his non-compete.
Court filings in the case show that Microsoft had paid Lee more than $3 million since August 2000, more than $1 million last year alone. Lee originally joined Microsoft in Asia in 1998 and founded its China research lab. He left and was rehired by Microsoft to work at its Redmond campus.
Google and Lee claim the Microsoft lawsuit is a "charade" meant to frighten other Microsoft workers from jumping to Google, according to court documents. The spat is the latest in an increasingly personal tussle between the companies, which compete in Internet search and other areas.
July 28, 2005
The Honorable Condoleezza Rice
Secretary of State
Washington, DC 20520
Dear Madam Secretary:
It has just come to my attention that then-Undersecretary of State John Bolton was interviewed on July 18, 2003 by the State Department Office of the Inspector General in connection with a joint State Department/CIA IG investigation related to the alleged Iraqi attempts to procure uranium from Niger. This information would appear to be inconsistent with information that Mr. Bolton provided to the Committee on Foreign Relations during the Committee’s consideration of his pending nomination to be Permanent Representative to the United Nations.
The Committee on Foreign Relations expects all nominees to provide to it accurate and timely information. Indeed, in submitting the Committee’s questionnaire, all nominees are required to swear out an affidavit stating that the information provided is “true and accurate.” It now appears that Mr. Bolton’s answers may not meet that standard. I write, therefore, to request that you review this matter to determine whether incomplete or inaccurate information was provided by Mr. Bolton.
Thank you for your assistance.
Sincerely,
Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
Ranking Minority Member
- Celebrate, for the 65th anniversary of the taquito has arrived.
- McSweeney's: Although I Like a Good George W. Bush Joke as Much as the Next Guy, Some of Them Seem Gratuitous and Mean-Spirited
Q: What do you get when you cross a giraffe and a monkey?
A: I'm sorry, I can't think about that right now because I'm too busy wondering why Congress hasn't launched an official investigation into Bush lying to the American public about WMDs and leading us into a war under false pretenses. Tell you what—as soon as I solve that little riddle, I'll get to work on your little genetic experiment.
- Unbelievably pretty photos of Sandia's Z-Machine in action. via
- Should probably mention that the Saudi King Fahd died the other day.
Much more later.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2005
"Would you be prepared if gravity reversed itself?"
- First Roberts is a member of the Federalist Society, then he doesn't remember ever being a member, now it's out that he was on the Steering Committee.
Last Wednesday, the day after Bush announced Roberts's nomination, the officials working on the nomination asked the White House press office to call each news organization that had reported Roberts's membership to tell them that he did not recall being a member. Asked yesterday if the White House would have done so knowing about the leadership directory, Perino said "Yes."
- Wired News: Roberts' Record Thin on Tech:
Attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation are holding their breath along with everyone else, calling Roberts' record "both sparse and mixed." While he sided with Verizon against the Recording Industry Association of America when the music trade group sought the identities of suspected illegal file traders, he also tends to bow to government authority, as he did in a case that let regulators take some items out of the public domain.
- Directions for building a laser-guided pencil gun out of ordinary cubicle supplies. I think this calls for a very special episode of MacGyver. I mean, can't you see Richard Dean Andersen scurrying around an office building late at night, dodging Murdock's fiendish traps as he scrounges enough paperclips to shoot a pencil into an elevator cable or something?
This was the first advanced gun and was constructed by Geir. It is made by assembling several Mauly clips and a thick rubberband and has tremendous firepower. With a regular pencil as projectile it can penetrate thick cardboard and empty soda cans. Never point this gun at anyone!
This gun is not practical for random battles, but more of a gun for the determined assassin. This gun IS dangerous!
- Microsoft's satellite viewer likes to pretend Apple never existed.
- Researchers at Harvard have observed speciation in butterflies. The interesting part is that it's occurring without any geographic barriers. They believe they've uncovered a reinforcement mechanism that explains this within the theory of natural selection.
The other mechanism that can theoretically divide a species is "reproductive isolation". This occurs when organisms are not separated physically, but "choose" not to breed with each other thereby causing genetic isolation, which amounts to the same thing.
Reproductive isolation is much hazier and more difficult to pin down than geographic isolation, which is why biologists are so excited about this family of butterflies.
[....] Dr Kandul and his colleagues found that if closely related species of Agrodiaetus are geographically separate, they tend to look quite similar. That is to say, they do not display a distinctive "team strip".
But if similarly closely related species are living side-by-side, the researchers noticed, they frequently look strikingly different - their "teams" are clearly advertised.
This has the effect of discouraging inter-species mating, thus encouraging genetic isolation and species divergence.
- Chinese companies are using Trojan horses for industrial espionage against America:
Forbes magazine, which first reported the mainland origin of Myfip, said the worm had been propagating by spam e-mails that activate the program when recipients click on attachments. Forbes said about a dozen versions of Myfip may have been in circulation and used to steal sensitive documents such as mechanical designs and circuit board layouts...
- Anonymous, America-loving Iraqis sure run into military officials an awful lot:
Sunday's news release said: "'The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the ISF and all of Iraq. They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists,' said one Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified."
The July 13 news release said: "'The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the children and all of Iraq,' said one Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified. 'They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists.'"
- J.D. Power & Associates (now owned by McGraw-Hill) sells its awards to the highest bidder:
Mike Greywitt, a J.D. Power spokesman, responded that there's nothing inappropriate about licensing its name for use by others.
"It's no different from any company that licenses its name for use on a product," he said. "Disney, for example, licenses its name. So does Coca-Cola."
The difference, of course, is that neither Disney nor Coke presents itself to consumers as an ostensibly neutral arbiter of other companies' goods and services. J.D. Power does.
- Laserglow.com sells pricey, powerful lasers. They've got ones that can slice through tape! Plus, they look like lightsabers and come in not only green, but also blue and yellow. I hope Professor Hathaway doesn't get his hands on this....
- Air America got accreditation and now have their very own member of the White House press corps.
Q There has been a lot of speculation concerning the meaning of the underlying statute in the grand jury investigation concerning Mr. Rove. The question is, have the legal counsel to the White House or White House staff reviewed the statute in sufficient specificity to determine whether a violation of that statute would, in effect, constitute treason?
MR. McCLELLAN: I think that in terms of decisions regarding the investigation, those are matters for those overseeing the investigation to decide.
- Ever wonder how acts like Good Charlotte, Jessica Simpson, Avril Lavigne, Jennifer Lopez, and Maroon 5 get popular when they suck so hard? Wonder no more. Payola never died:
In other instances, program directors were offered and/or received electronic goods such as flat-screen TVs, entertainment systems, laptop computers, PlayStation 2 consoles and games, and portable CD players, as well as flights, hotel stays and car service. Radio stations that participated in the payola schemes include WQHT-FM in New York (Hot 97); WWPR-FM in New York (Power 105); KHTS-FM in San Diego (Channel 933); WRHT-FM in Greenville, North Carolina; WFLY-FM in Albany, New York (Fly 92.3), WWHT-FM in Syracuse, New York (Hot 107.9); and WSSP-FM in Milwaukee (The Beat), among others. In response to one such offer, a program director e-mailed the label, saying, "I'm a whore this week, what can I say?"
- I know what I can say. I can quote The Ataris, from before they sold their souls:
I'm really fucking sick
Of Beck and 311,
And Marylin Manson,
I wish someone would break his fucking neck.
And what about Bush
And lame-ass Oasis?
Hey, talk about pretentious,
why don't they just blow England off the map?
Every now and then
I turn it on again
But it's plain to see that
The radio still sucks.
Every now and then
I turn it on again
But it's plain to see that
The radio still sucks.
- Okay, now I feel better about having never finished Windwaker. Zelda auteur Shigeru Miyamoto's come clean and apologized for the end of the game:
"At the end of the production we fought against the clock and there were parts that I was forced to approve even though it didn't feel complete," he said.
"I apologise that we didn't fix the triforce hunt at the end of the game. It was slow and dull."
Posted by Jon Rubin at 02:28 PM | Comments (0)
July 24, 2005
1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0
Welcome to the 150th post to ubiquit.us blog. For today's festivities, I'm going to begin with a few pages out of my rss aggregator, followed up with some oldies but goodies. No, fear not, I don't mean the blog equivalent of a clip show, rehashing old posts. You'll see. But first, I'll start off with some true geekery.
• The War on Terror, recorded as a Bash Shell command line history:
$ cd /middle_east
$ ls
Afghanistan Iraq Libya Saudi_Arabia UAE
Algeria Israel Morrocco Sudan Yemen
Bahrain Jordan Oman Syria
Egypt Kuwait Palestine Tunisia
Iran Lebanon Qatar Turkey
$ cd Afghanistan
$ ls
bin Taliban
$ rm Taliban
rm: Taliban is a directory
$ cd Taliban
$ ls
soldiers
$ rm soldiers
$ cd ..
$ rmdir Taliban
rmdir: directory "Taliban": Directory not empty
$ cd Taliban
$ ls -a
. .. .insurgents
$ chown -R USA .*
chown: .insurgents: Not owner
It goes on like that, through the war in Iraq.....if you didn't find it funny, you're just not big enough of a nerd.
• Appear on the Daily Show in an Ed Helms interview, lose your job.
• Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing has been sharing his research for a new book on Sidney Gottlieb, the guy who was in charge of such great CIA hits as Operation Midnight Climax and MKULTRA.
• In a little bit of synchronicity, searching for those posts on Gottlieb in NetNewsWire also brought up a November '04 post by Ken Layne about weird government projects, like Gottlieb and Cameron's brainwashing experiments.
I've got a confession to make. Sometimes, I'm too lazy to post, even when my computer runs out of RAM. So instead of just losing links, I store them in a VoodooPad document I creatively call "links to post to ubi." Here are some hand-selected entries.
• A brief history of Belleair, the town where I've lived pretty much my whole life.
As a community, Belleair started out at the end of the line. But what a line!
In the 1890’s, railroad magnate Henry B. Plant constructed his showpiece hotel on a high bluff south of Clearwater, complete with a railroad siding for the private cars of his wealthy winter patrons.
The Belleview Hotel had its grand opening in January 1897. Its location was on a peninsula west of Tampa Bay which was to become Pinellas County in 1912. Guests at the Belleview enjoyed the amenities of regal, rustic living; yachting on Clearwater Bay, horseback riding in the piney woods south of the hotel; golfing, tennis, skeet shooting and bicycling.
The national craze for bicycling found a home at the hotel and at the turn of the century, Belleair was the scene of six-day bicycle races and many other national and international prominent cycling events.
• That hotel, a historic landmark (where I had my Bar Mitzvah in 1995, natch) is going to be torn down to build luxury condos. It's sad; the Biltmore is the largest wood-frame building in Florida. There's a movement to save it, and the hotel's been named "one of America's 11 most endangered historic places."
• Wow. You'd think I'd have something more interesting than local history in my link archive. Instead, more Belleair. Belleair's flowing boulevards were laid out by renowned "dean of city planners" John Nolen. His "garden city" aesthetic was responsible for beautifying locales as varied as Madison, San Diego (Balboa Park? Thank John Nolen), Charlotte, and Kingsport. But his biggest impact was on Florida, in West Palm Beach, St. Pete, Sarasota, Clearwater, Venice, Gainesville, St. Augustine, and Belleair. There aren't many urban areas in the state, outside of downtown Tampa and Miami. Florida's really a collection of far-flung, interconnected suburbs. It's called "New Urbanism" and can in large part be attributed to a speech Nolen gave in St. Petersburg in 1926. That speech, of course, isn't available online, but here are some snippets of Nolen's planning philosophy:
"In political rights we have democracy enough; judging by results perhaps more than we have fitness for. But should we not work for a wider democracy of recreation, for more opportunity to enjoy those forms of beauty and pleasure which feed and refresh the soul as bread does the body? We should no longer be content with mere increase in population and wealth. We should insist upon asking, How do the people live, where do they work, what do they play?"
...and on the Depression, which destroyed his career:
I have abundant faith that sooner or later we shall rise from it with some added strength, but the waste and demoralization is very costly. . . . The planning movement itself has been set back and it will take time to recover. Unfortunately, these losses fall most heavily upon the poor, both in money and in lack of better facilities for recreation, education, housing, etc.
• Here are transcriptions of an extremely long interview given by Bucky Fuller about "Everything I Know"
• Background on "one of the most ancient Roman festivals," Lupercalia, and how February got its name:
Here the Luperci assembled on the day of the Lupercalia, and sacrificed to the god goats and young dogs, which animals are remarkable for their strong sexual instinct, and thus were appropriate sacrifices to the god of fertility (Plut. Rom. 21; Servius ad Aen. viii.343). Two youths of noble birth were then led to the Luperci, and one of the latter touched their foreheads with a sword dipped in the blood of the victims; other Luperci immediately after wiped off the bloody spots with wool dipped in milk. Hereupon the two youths were obliged to break out into a shout of laughter. This ceremony was probably a symbolical purification of the shepherds. After the sacrifice was over, the Luperci partook of a meal, at which they were plentifully supplied with wine (Val. Max. ii.2.9). They then cut the skins of the goats which they had sacrificed, into pieces; with some of which they covered parts of their body in imitation of the god Lupercus, who was represented half naked and half covered with goat-skin. The other pieces of the skins they cut into thongs, and holding them in their hands they ran through the streets of the city, touching or striking with them all persons whom they met in their way, and especially women, who even used to come forward voluntarily for the purpose, since they believed that this ceremony rendered them fruitful, and procured them an easy delivery in childbearing. This act of running about with thongs of goat-skin was a symbolic purification of the land, and that of touching persons a purification of men, for the words by which this act is designated are februare and lustrare (Ovid. Fast. ii.31; Fest. s.v. Februarius). The goat-skin itself was called februum, the festive day dies februata, the month in which it occurred Februarius, and the god himself Februus.
• How the hell did I not post this months and months ago?! Guy Gavriel Kay's hauntingly beautiful novel, The Lions of Al-Rassan, is being adapted into a film.
One part of Lions of Al-Rassan has always pissed me off. Everything else in the book is so well researched, and then we come to this glaring anachronism:
Rodrigo Belmonte, still in boots and winter cloak, with his sword on and the whip in his belt, strode into the room. He had, incongruously, a cup of chocolate in each hand.
He offered one to Jehane. "Drink. I had to promise this was for you and no one else. The older one downstairs is greedy and wanted it all."
"And what about me?" Ibn Khairan complained. "I did damage to my wrists and fingers making wolves and pigs for them."
Rodrigo laughed. He took a sip from the other cup. "Well, if you must know the truth, this one was for you as a reward, but I didn't actually promise, and the chocolate is good and I was cold. You've been inside and warm for a while." He lowered the cup and smiled.
"You've chocolate on your moustache," Jehane said. "And you are supposed to be outside the walls. Defending the city. Much good you are to anyone, arriving now."
"Exactly," Ammar said with a vigorous nod of his head. "Give me my chocolate."
Rodrigo did so. He looked at Jehane.
"Martin fetched me. We weren't far away. Jehane, you'll have to choose between being angry with me for having you guarded, or for not being here to defend you myself."
"Why?" she snapped. "Why can't I be angry for both?"
"Exactly," said Ammar again, sipping the chocolate. His tone was so smugly pleased it almost made her laugh.
• AksMe antonomasia and synecdoche
• From McSweeney's: "Things I'd Probably Say If the Bush Administration Were Just a Weekly TV Show and I Were a Regular Viewer"
"Come on, in real life you'd never get away with something like that."
Huh. I thought I had more links in that file. But fear not, "links to post to ubi" isn't the only document on my computer stuffed with random URLs. I'll just have to look closer.
• Bruce Schneier on the legacy of the new-defunct Data Encryption Standard:
It took the academic community two decades to figure out that the NSA "tweaks" actually improved the security of DES. This means that back in the '70s, the National Security Agency was two decades ahead of the state of the art.
• The Bush White House uses Yahoo! Mail so they don't have to worry about internal emails getting released to the public. I suppose evading subpoenas is just a fringe benefit.
• One of Christopher Marlowe's achievements was translating Ovid's Elegies into English. Several years ago, I memorized the first Elegy as an attempt to impress a girl. It didn't work, but I still think it's a pretty, playful, reluctant love poem. I've laid it out here with the stanza divisions I used to help with memorization:
We which were Ovids five books, now are three,
For these before the rest preferreth he:
If reading five thou plainst of tediousnesse,
Two tane away, thy labor will be lesse:
With Muse upreard I meant to sing of armes,
Choosing a subject fit for feirse alarmes:
Both verses were alike till Love (men say)
Began to smile and tooke one foote away.
Rash boy, who gave thee power to change a line?
We are the Muses prophets, none of thine.
What if thy Mother take Dianas bowe,
Shall Dian fanne when love begins to glowe?
In wooddie groves ist meete that Ceres Raigne,
And quiver bearing Dian till the plaine:
Who'le set the faire treste sunne in battell ray,
While Mars doth take the Aonian harpe to play?
Great are thy kingdomes, over strong and large,
Ambitious Imp, why seekst thou further charge?
Are all things thine? the Muses Tempe thine?
Then scarse can Phoebus say, this harpe is mine.
When in this workes first verse I trod aloft,
Love slackt my Muse, and made my numbers soft.
I have no mistris, nor no favorit,
Being fittest matter for a wanton wit,
Thus I complaind, but Love unlockt his quiver,
Tooke out the shaft, ordaind my hart to shiver:
And bent his sinewy bow upon his knee,
Saying, Poet heers a worke beseeming thee.
Oh woe is me, he never shootes but hits,
I burne, love in my idle bosome sits.
Let my first verse be sixe, my last five feete,
Fare well sterne warre, for blunter Poets meete.
Elegian Muse, that warblest amorous laies,
Girt my shine browe with sea banke mirtle praise.
Here's some explication, grace à Google:
Marlowe has paradoxically translated this discussion of the varying elegiac metre into iambic pentameter, but he has neverthless caught the effect of the original by first setting up a strictly regular pattern of iambs in the first few lines before diversifying into the irregularity of the final trochee followed by a spondee of “Girt my shine brow”.
Moreover, Patrick Cheney has recently suggested, in his book Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession, that Marlowe's encounter with Ovid here shaped his whole career, deciding him on choosing an iconoclastic Ovidian pattern of generic development rather than a conformist Virgilian one in order to position himself in deliberate opposition to Spenser, who was presenting himself as the English Virgil. There is certainly clear evidence that Marlowe's work was received as radical: on 1 June 1599, six years after his death, copies of All Ovid's Elegies were publicly burnt on the orders of the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Shakespeare is generally taken to be reflecting on this event in As You Like It when he has Touchstone say to Audrey, “I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths” (III.iii.5-7).
It is not hard to see why the work would have been found shocking. The elegies include advice to the poet's mistress on how to behave herself at a banquet attended by both her husband and her lover; the poet's remorse for an occasion on which he has hit her; and a graphic description of her self-procured abortion which even includes hints on how this might be attempted (though eating underripe apples is unlikely to produce much effect). The work's dangerousness is emphasised by the fact that Marlowe makes it abundantly apparent that he expects his work to have resonances for a modern reader by using sharply contemporary rather than classicising terms, such as “French”, “nuns”, and “puritan”, all of which suggest that the poems' ability to affect an audience is by no means exhausted. As a result, these unscholarly forays of a four-hundred-years-dead undergraduate still read freshly today.
• My favorite bit of Livy has always been the Destruction of Alba:
Meanwhile the cavalry had been sent on in advance to conduct the population to Rome; they were followed by the legions, who were marched thither to destroy the city. When they entered the gates there was not that noise and panic which are usually found in captured cities, where, after the gates have been shattered or the walls levelled by the battering-ram or the citadel stormed, the shouts of the enemy and the rushing of the soldiers through the streets throw everything into universal confusion with fire and sword. Here, on the contrary, gloomy silence and a grief beyond words so petrified the minds of all, that, forgetting in their terror what to leave behind, what to take with them, incapable of thinking for themselves and asking one another's advice, at one moment they would stand on their thresholds, at another wander aimlessly through their houses, which they were seeing then for the last time. But now they were roused by the shouts of the cavalry ordering their instant departure, now by the crash of the houses undergoing demolition, heard in the furthest corners of the city, and the dust, rising in different places, which covered everything like a cloud. Seizing hastily what they could carry, they went out of the city, and left behind their hearths and household gods and the homes in which they had been born and brought up. Soon an unbroken line of emigrants filled the streets, and as they recognised one another the sense of their common misery led to fresh outbursts of tears. Cries of grief, especially from the women, began to make themselves heard, as they walked past the venerable temples and saw them occupied by troops, and felt that they were leaving their gods as prisoners in an enemy's hands. When the Albans had left their city the Romans levelled to the ground all the public and private edifices in every direction, and a single hour gave over to destruction and ruin the work of those four centuries during which Alba had stood. The temples of the gods, however, were spared, in accordance with the king's proclamation.
In the words of The Master, "Here endeth the lesson."
Posted by Jon Rubin at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2005
Yet another assortment, part the first
• Google Maps gets man out of traffic ticket
• LumaRay has released the beauteous FL12 flashlight. Unfortunately, they're charging an unbelievable $119.95.
• An awesome Robert Browning quote:
"Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!"
• So that we don't have to, Steve whips up two batches of prison hooch and conducts a taste test.
Crick [...] later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
• key23: bastion of the relativistic conspiracy
• "The Mountains of Pi" is a lengthy piece from the New Yorker's archives about the mathematical Chudnovsky brothers and their homegrown supercomputer. The article inspired the movie Pi:
“Galileo saw the moons of Jupiter through his telescope, and he tried to figure out the laws of gravity by looking at the moons, but he couldn’t,” David said. “With pi, we are at the stage of looking at the moons of Jupiter.” He pulled his Mini Mag-Lite flashlight out of his pocket and shone it into a bookshelf, rooted through some file folders, and handed me a color photograph of pi. “This is a piscape,” he said. The photograph showed a mountain range in cyberspace: bony peaks and ridges cut by valleys. The mountains and valleys were splashed with colors—yellow, green, orange, violet, and blue. It was the first eight million digits of pi, mapped as a fractal landscape by an I.B.M. GF-11 supercomputer at Yorktown Heights, which Gregory had programmed from his bed. Apart from its vivid colors, pi looks like the Himalayas.
Gregory thought that the mountains of pi seemed to contain structure. “I see something systematic in this landscape, but it may be just an attempt by the brain to translate some random visual pattern into order,” he said. As he gazed into the nature beyond nature, he wondered if he stood close to a revelation about the circle and its diameter. “Any very high hill in this picture, or any flat plateau, or deep valley, would be a sign of something in pi,” he said. “There are slight variations from randomness in this landscape. There are fewer peaks and valleys than you would expect if pi were truly random, and the peaks and valleys tend to stay high or low a little longer than you’d expect.” In a manner of speaking, the mountains of pi looked to him as if they’d been molded by the hand of the Nameless One, Deus absconditus (the hidden God), but he couldn’t really express in words what he thought he saw and, to his great frustration, he couldn’t express it in the language of mathematics, either.
“Exploring pi is like exploring the universe,” David remarked.
“It’s more like exploring underwater,” Gregory said. “You are in the mud, and everything looks the same. You need a flashlight. Our computer is the flashlight.”
David said, “Gregory—I think, really—you are getting tired.”
A fax machine in a corner beeped and emitted paper. It was a message from a hardware dealer in Atlanta. David tore off the paper and stared at it. “They didn’t ship it! I’m going to kill them! This a service economy. Of course, you know what that means— the service is terrible.”
“We collect price quotes by fax,” Gregory said.
“It’s a horrible thing. Window-shopping in supercomputerland. We can’t buy everything—”
“Because everything won’t exist,” Gregory said.
“We only want to build a machine to compute a few transcendental numbers—”
“Because we are not licensed for transcendental meditation,” Gregory said.
• Miqel.com is a repository of information about art, math, and metaphysics.
• Miqel's Introduction to Phi and the Golden Mean
• StatCounter.com is a free web counter.
• Jumpcut is a clipboard enhancement tool for Mac OS X.
• Eliot Cohen questions his hawkishness in the Washington Post, as his son goes off to war.
• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python
• l0gic.net Required Reading
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:10 PM
July 09, 2005
Assorted, since I'm out of memory
• Banner year for agave growers as tequila production and exports hit record levels.
• The researcher whose data the ONDCP uses to claim weed causes lung cancer reverses path, says statistics show no correlation between toking and lung cancer.
• Fossilized footprints push back first North American settlement by 30,000 years.
• Brit Hume sees "time to buy" in terror.
• The most activist act a judge can make is to declare a law unconstitutional, since the Constitution doesn't grant justices that power. It comes from Marbury v. Madison. By that standard, the most activist judge on the SCOTUS bench is Clarence Thomas. Followed by Kennedy. Followed by Scalia. Followed by Rehnquist. Followed by O'Connor. So the five-four conservative majority are the most activist.
• DEA shuts down research chemical purveyors in Operation Web Tryp.
• Jorn Barger, who writes my favorite (and the first) blog, RobotWisdom, spent some time as "A bum in a Google cap."
• Fafblog explains The Plan:
Q: Why do we need the plan?
A: To stop terrorists like Saddam bin Laden from building another World Trade Center in Iraq - just so they can blow it up again.
• David Foster Wallace gives a commencement speech
• Bob Cringely describes a new device to bind your cellphone to Skype, so you can make unlimited calls anywhere in the world, and any Skype user can call your cell for free.
• RNSplicer lets you tunnel Bonjour discovery beacons through subnets.
• MovableType's CSS templates, illustrated.
• Saved By the Bell, analyzed:
Ahhh...back to Bayside. For a second I thought I was watching a different show. Bayside's an interesting high school. It appears to have around 22 students, and over half of them are mutes. There's only one hallway ever shown, which leads me to believe the school only has two classrooms and a principal's office. The lockers seem to have inherited Optimus Prime's theory of subspace, being able to hold everything from the school's football players to Lisa's entire wardrobe. All in all, its definitely the reincarnation of the Twilight Zone.
• Bush spazzes on his bike, yet again.
• The History of Malt Liquor, from Gaybree to Billy Dee.
• The Oil We Eat
• Jared Diamond on the Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
• Anatomy of a Hack: The Rise and Fall of Your Network
• Balls Out: How to throw a no-hitter on acid, and other lessons from the career of baseball legend Dock Ellis
• +Ma's Reversing riddle and the answer to the first puzzle
• Mother Earth Mother Board: Neal Stephenson goes on a lengthy hacker tour, tracking deep sea intercontinental data pipes.
• IronGeek's Zaurus Security Tools Page
• THC-HYDRA - fast and flexible network login cracker
• Eric Raymond explains How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
• Auditor is a security tools distro of Knoppix
• AksMe WEP Hacking Risks
• Does Skype offer "best-in-class" Security?
• New Attacks on AES / Rijndael
Posted by Jon Rubin at 01:49 PM
July 01, 2005
Link dump
I haven't posted much since I've been meaning to write up my take on Mactel for Cory's edification. That's languishing as an early draft. However, my web browser is using up 1.4GB of RAM, so I think it's time to clean.
• This brilliant and terrible Flash presentation visualizes Coalition casualties in Iraq in a very raw, direct way:
Iraq War Fatalities is a chart of the US and coalition military fatalities that have occurred in the war in Iraq since the onset, mapped across the dimensions of time and space.
[....] The animation runs at ten frames per second—one frame for each day—and a single black dot indicates the geographic location that a US military fatality occurred. Eat dot starts as a white flash and a larger red dot which fades to black over the span of 30 frames/days, and then slowly fades to grey over the span of the entire war.
Accompanying the visual representation is a soft 'tic' sound for each fatality, the volume of which increases relative to the number of fatalities that occurred simultaneously that day. More deaths in a smaller area produces visually deeper reds and audibly more pronounced 'tic's.
• A photo of artificially illuminated rat neurons that looks like it could have been drawn by someone on LSD.
• Sage Francis runs a site called Knowmore.org:
We are a grassroots, web-based community dedicated to chronicling and resisting corporate attacks on democracy, worker's and human rights, fair trade, business ethics and the environment. Our shared goal of a more informed and conscious consumer is being accomplished via this website: a vast database of easily searchable corporate and political info designed to aid responsible citizens, progressive thinkers and activists.
• Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat:
Many people are astonished to learn that the man who wrote about "that poor little boy" is such a rabid Fascist. But Card has always been a rabid Fascist, as well as several other species of asshat, and none of his works demonstrate that better than the sad tale of Ender Wiggin itself.
This is backed up by another critique of Ender's Game, Creating the Innocent Killer:
If, therefore, intention alone determines guilt or innocence, and the dead are dead because of misunderstanding or because they bring destruction on themselves, and the true sacrifice is the suffering of the killer rather than the killed—then Ender’s feeling of guilt is gratuitous. Yet despite the fact that he is fundamentally innocent, he takes “the sins of the world” onto his shoulders and bears the opprobrium that properly belongs to the people who made him into their instrument of genocide. He is the murderer as scapegoat. The genocide as savior. Hitler as Christ the redeemer.
• RhapsOGL, an OpenGL iTunes visualizer.
• The Etherkiller is the wrath of the IT department: RJ45 on one end, AC on the other. Bringing new meaning to the words "Powered Hub."
• Creating an Application with Tiger Technologies
• Layer Four Traceroute (LFT):
Rather than launching UDP probes in an attempt to elicit ICMP TIME_EXCEEDEDs from hosts in the path, LFT accomplishes substantively the same effect using TCP SYN or FIN probes. Then, LFT listens for TIME_EXCEEDED messages, TCP RESET, and various other interesting heuristics from firewalls or other gateways in the path. LFT also distinguishes between TCP-based protocols (source and destination), which make its statistics slightly more realistic, and gives a savvy user the ability to trace protocol routes, not just layer-3 (IP) hops.
• xBack puts the screen saver on the desktop.
• Learn about the evolution of the Starbucks logo, from a saucy siren spreading her tails to beckon sailors to her snatch, to her current G-rated form.
• Did you know there's a subliminal arrow in the Fedex logo?
• A collection of boghouse graffiti from London of the 1700s
• Cory Doctorow's article on SCOTUS' Grokster decision
• Operation Site Down, the FBI's attempt to take down some of the Top Site warez groups, included a pretty major sting operation, where the Feds posed as traders and hosted servers.
• And, of course, today's big story is O'Connor stepping down.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 04:07 PM
May 14, 2005
One day I'll start publishing one link, one post
...Just not now.
• Seventeen U.S. soldiers killed since Saturday:
The latest deaths came Wednesday when two Marines died and 14 were wounded as an armoured vehicle in which they were traveling hit a mine during an offensive against insurgents in in Karabilah, north-west Iraq.
One of these has been identified as Lance Cpl. Wesley G. Davids, 20, of Dublin, Ohio.
Monday saw Pfc. Stephen P. Baldwyn, 19, of Saltillo, Miss. and Lance Cpl. Taylor B. Prazynski, 20, of Fairfield, Ohio lose their lives as a result of wounds received from an explosion while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Nasser Wa Salaam, and Al Karmah, Iraq.
Also killed Monday was Lance Cpl. Marcus Mahdee, 20, of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., who died from an enemy explosion while conducting combat operations in the vicinity of Al Karmah, Iraq.
Seven soldiers died Sunday. They were Lance Cpl. Lawrence R. Philippon, 22, of Hartford, Conn., who was killed by enemy small-arms fire while conducting combat operations in the vicinity of Al Qa’im, Iraq, Cpl. Dustin A. Derga, 24, of Columbus, Ohio, who was also killed by small arms fire in Ubaydi, Iraq., Cpl. Richard P. Schoener, 22, of Hayes, La., who was killed in action in Alishang, Afghanistan, and Sgt. Gary A. Eckert Jr., 24, of Toledo, Ohio, who died in Balad, from injuries sustained earlier that day in Samarra, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV; and Staff Sgt. Thor H. Ingraham, 24, of Murrysville, Pa. and Pfc. Nicolas E. Messmer, 20, of Franklin, Ohio, who were killed in Khalidiyah, Iraq, when they were conducting combat operations and an improvised explosive device detonated near their HMMWV. Also killed was Lance Cpl. Nicholas C. Kirven, 21, of Richmond, Va., who died as the result of enemy action in Alishang, Afghanistan.
Three Marines who died after explosions from improvised explosive devices in Al Anbar Province, Iraq on Saturday were Sgt. Aaron N. Cepeda Sr., 22, and Lance Cpl. Lance T. Graham, 26, both of San Antonio, Texas, and Lance Cpl. Michael V. Postal, 21, of Glen Oaks, N.Y.
A sailor who also died Saturday in combat was identified as Petty Officer Third Class Jeffery L. Wiener, 32, of Louisville, Ky.,
Also Saturday, Sgt. Michael A. Marzano, 28, of Greenville, Pa., died as the result of an explosion caused by a car bombing in Hadithah, Iraq.
Not included in the seventeen killed since Saturday was 1st Sgt. Michael J. Bordelon, 37, of Morgan City, La., who died Tuesday at Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas, from injuries sustained April 23 in Mosul, Iraq, when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated near his Stryker military vehicle.
Of course, this article is several days old. Unfortunately, even more American citizens have been sacrificed to our executive's hubris since then.
• America continues its slow slide towards fascism with the passage of “Real ID” attached as a rider to, of course, an Iraq appropriations bill. News.com has an EFF-approved summary of what this means. I'd like to take this time to point out that while I'm registered as a Democrat so as to vote in the Democratic primaries, it's because of capitulations like this one that I don't identify as a Democrat. I won't swear fealty to any political party that would abandon democratic principles so readily. This is a tragic coda to the Iraq War resolution and the PATRIOT Act. When will the Senate Democrats stop enabling the police state?
• Robert McNamara has repudiated Mutually Assured Destruction.
• AksMe: Temporal compression
• btefnet.net: RIP
• Following up on the production halt for season 3 of Chappelle's Show, gossip has it that Dave Chappelle is in a South African “mental health facility.” Guess someone was enjoying the fruits of his $50 million contract a bit too much, hmm? Obligatory non-denial denial: “Chappelle's representatives have denied that the comedian was abusing drugs.” [EDIT: Now he's got an “exclusive interview” with Time. Guess it's just an elaborate publicity stunt...]
• In other TV-related news, Dark Horse is going to publish a three-issue comic book series that bridges the tumultuous six months between Firefly and Serenity.
• Most of America's narcotics come from our ports. In particular, the Gulf of Mexico/Carribean sector is a huge corridor. There's a reason Florida and Texas are two of America's top drug-importing states. So how's the war on terror affecting the war on drugs?
Indiana Republican Rep. Mark Souder, who chairs the House subcommittee on criminal justice, drug policy and human resources, cited figures showing that patrols through a narcotics transit zone that includes the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico had fallen by 71 percent in two years from 5,964 hours in 2002 to 1,741 hours last year.
At the same time, the number of U.S. Air Force sites operating balloon-borne radars has fallen from 14 to eight since 2000.
• Spotlight tips from Apple and MacOSXHints, plus using Boolean search terms in Spotlight.
• How-to: securely control another Mac over the internet using VNC and ssh tunneling.
• TiddlyWiki is a “reusable non-linear personal web notebook” aka a pretty wiki engine in a single client-side HTML file with CSS and JavaScript.
• Here's something you don't see everyday: a well-researched essay on the Priory of Sion that actually takes into account that the prieure documents were most likely forgeries.
• The High German analogues of nightmares and succubi were Alptraum and Alpdruck, or “Elf-dream” and “Elf-pressure.”
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:17 PM
May 04, 2005
Where to start?
This lengthy profile of Douglas Feith is truly a must-read.
It's got great soundbites from related figures:
“I don’t know whether Feith deserves more praise for supporting George W. Bush’s foreign policy or more criticism for being an agent of Rumsfeld,” William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said.
And:
A spokesman for Franks, Michael Hayes, said in an e-mail that the General would not comment for this article: “What do you think he has to gain by talking about Feith?”
It artfully reveals Feith's hypocrisy in using “the intellectual crowd” as a slur while at the same time revealing him to be a pretentious prat:
Feith detoured through Disraeli—“He was attacked by many people, the way the neocons get attacked, because he had this fascinating idea that, as he put it, the workingman is a natural conservative”—and then became absorbed in Elie Kedourie’s “In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth.” He looked up long enough to ask, “You’ve read the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1916, haven’t you?”
He refuses to give up on the logical fallacy of invading Iraq as a response to 9/11:
I asked Feith what had gone wrong in Iraq.
“Your assumption is that everything went wrong,” he replied.
I hadn’t said that, but I spoke of the loss of American lives—more than fifteen hundred soldiers, most of whom died after the declared end of major combat operations. This number, I said, strikes many people as a large and terrible loss.
“Based on what?” Feith asked. “It’s a large sacrifice. It’s a serious loss. It’s an absolute disaster for the families. Nobody can possibly deny how horrible the loss is for the families involved. But this was an operation to prevent the next, as it were, 9/11, the next major attack that could kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Americans, and Iraq is a country of twenty-five million people and it was a major enterprise.”
This quickly leads to a rehash of the Bush administration misdirection stage-magic that preceded the war:
I asked Feith if he would have recommended the invasion of Iraq if he knew then what he knows now.
“The main rationale was not based on intelligence,” Feith said. “It was known to anyone who read newspapers and knew history. Saddam had used nerve gas, he had invaded his neighbors more than once, he had attacked other neighbors, he was hostile to us, he supported numerous terrorist groups. It’s true that he didn’t have a link that we know of to 9/11. . . . But he did give safe haven to terrorists.”
Feith went on, “Given the ease, as everybody knows, with which one can reconstitute stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons if you have the capabilities which he had, I don’t think the rationale for the war hinged on the existence of stockpiles.” The postmortem reports of C.I.A. weapons inspectors confirm the view that Saddam remained interested in one day reconstituting his weapons-of-mass-destruction programs, Feith said, and went on, “There’s a certain revisionism in people looking back and identifying the main intelligence error”—the assumption of stockpiles—“and then saying that our entire policy was built on that error.” The case against Iraq, he argues today, was only partly about W.M.D.s.
One day, I asked Feith to describe the importance to him of Lincoln. He admires Lincoln, he said, for many reasons, but in particular for the stalwart way that Lincoln confronted evil. When I suggested that Feith might also admire Lincoln because Lincoln shifted the rationale for his war in the middle of the fighting, Feith replied, with enthusiasm, “I never thought of that. That’s right.”
His answer surprised me. I had expected him to say something like “The Bush Administration has not changed the rationale for the war.”
Maybe you didn't notice, but Feith is walking into a trap.:
The next morning, Feith telephoned. He had evidently been thinking about his answer, because he had searched out a better one. He found it in an article by Nicholas Lemann, published in this magazineshortly before the beginning of the war, in which Feith was quoted as saying: “When you can think that if we do things right, and if we help the Iraqis, and if the Iraqis show an ability to create a humane representative government for themselves—will that have beneficial spillover effects on the politics of the whole region? The answer, I think, is yes.”
He read this to me and added, “I must say, I’m damn proud of that sentence. That was right on the nose.”
SNAP! Trap just shut:
Feith, though, had left out part of what he told Lemann. “Would anybody be thinking about using military power in Iraq in order to do a political experiment in Iraq in the hope that it would have positive political spillover effects throughout the region?” he asked Lemann. “The answer is no.” He continued: “What we would be using military power for, if we have to, would be the goals the President has talked about, particularly the elimination of the chemical and biological weapons, and preventing Iraq from getting nuclear weapons.”
Now, for all that Feith is, as Tommy Franks famously put it, “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth,” he's got enough brains to use sophistry to mislead. Here he is setting up a false dichotomy:
Feith went on, “The Marshall Plan didn’t get going until 1948. Here we are less than two years after the liberation of Baghdad, and an enormous amount of reconstruction has been done.
...as if one could seriously compare the level of post-war planning in a defensive, global war started with a surprise attack with the level of post-war planning in an offensive, regional war of choice.
Feith also pulls out of his ass the lamest cop-out of all time:
If you say to me, ‘Have errors been made in Iraq?,’ I would say yes. Yes, I saw lots of things that I think I would have done—I saw lots of decisions made that I might have done differently. I would say there’s not a single person in the United States government, probably including the President, who would not say the same thing.”
When I asked Feith to describe some incorrect decisions, he said, “A lot of questions of that kind are going to take a little bit of distance and historical perspective to sort out.”
Actually, I take it back. The lamest cop-out of all time follows soon after:
When I asked, for instance, if the Administration was too enamored of the idea that Iraqis would greet American troops with flowers, he argued that some Iraqis were still too intimidated by the remnants of Saddam’s Baath Party to express their emotions openly. “But,” Feith said, “they had flowers in their minds.”
To defend his lack of regrets over the war, Feith compares himself, a leading policy-maker in government circles whose decisions quite literally concern life and death, to a woman who writes fluffy 700-word columns to attract eyeballs for a leading fishwrap:
[Maureen Dowd] went on to suggest that a quagmire was in the offing [in Afghanistan]. Feith put down the clippings and asked, “Where does she say, ‘Oops, I guess I got it completely wrong’?”
I think you can sum up all the problems with the neoconservatives in the following sentence. It's basically a rehash of the ancient idea of the village idiot somehow having holy wisdom because in his simplicity he is pure of heart. Compare and contrast with the pre-election talk of “the reality-based community”:
George W. Bush has more insight, because of his knowledge of human beings and his sense of history, about the motive force, the craving for freedom and participation in self-rule, than do many of the language experts and history experts and culture experts.“
Posted by Jon Rubin at 02:25 PM
April 29, 2005
Odd ends
Well, my copy of Tiger should be arriving shortly, so I'm going to clear out these assorted and unrelated links to better be able to restart.
• Warning! Dangerous hacker! If you don't find this funny, you aren't a nerd. [via mefi]
• Frist refused a compromise to end the filibuster crisis in the Senate.
• The ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct, and very pretty.
• Kristof sums up Bush's failures with North Korea.
• AksMe: pre-Frankenstein sci-fi?
• AksMe: learning to play bridge?
• Blair's secret legal advice to seek another resolution before Iraq War Redux has been leaked.
• Jack Abramoff or Abraham Jackoff? You decide.
• Carlos Castaneda & George Lucas
• Star Wars Origins is a comprehensive concordance of things Star Wars ripped off.
• I'm viscerally enjoying this death-by-a-thousand-cuts that Tom DeLay's receiving. Like yesterday. Yesterday was “Tom DeLay's a hypocrite” day, as the House Ethics committee backed down on its supposedly-necessary procedural change that would have let DeLay survive any inquiry, and we got this amazing bit of photographic evidence from Time.
Since he wasn't on US soil at the time, the picture of Tom by itself would be meaningless, and totally not noteworthy. But Time searched the archives and found that money quote, making Tom “The Hammer” DeLay an obvious hypocrite to anyone who can read one sentence and look at one picture.
Sure, it's not a shocker. It's in character all right. But the idea is, I think, to subject DeLay to so many of these little stories that it's impossible for him to function, since there are just too many tales to deny. He's “The Hammer.” One big blow is something he's used to, something he's prepared for and hows kow to deal with and to survive.
He won't say anything about this. It's too minor for him to deign to recognize its existence, or so I'd imagine. And that's the beauty of it...because it's still gonna stick in the minds of any readers Time has left in print, and bloggers will surely propagate it online.
I like the Cuban cigar story because it's just pointed. It's easy to explain. And it's a great anecdotal way to sum up his whole character. It'd fit in well in a movie, to quickly sketch out a slimy stereotypical politician. They'd have him say that quote in front of a crowd in one scene, and then follow it with him back at his hotel suite lighting up that bad boy. It's not about making him out to be a criminal—that's besides the point, neither here not here, and he did not do anything technically illegal. It's just a dictionary definition of Tom DeLay's character.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:11 AM
April 24, 2005
QuintaMegaPost, or, Whoops, Looks Like I Lied About Posting Regularly
• Will wonders never cease? Grolsch has released an adapter to attach to cans of its beer, so as to drink as from a bottle.
• The International Bankers Secret Kabbalah Carnivale Page is a Yahoo group for discussion of the mystical/religious aspects of HBO's series Carnivale.
• Lotus 23 is an innovative umbrella design that unfolds like a lilly.
• Statistics bely conservative claims that the judiciary is overrun with liberal “activist judges.”
• Apple came up with Ajax in the late 90s and called it Remote Scripting.
• Sean-Paul over at the Agonist catches the US military in the ultimate hubris—trying to literally usurp the gods' omniscient viewpoint from Olympus.
• Using the spectroscopic techniques pioneered to read the papyrus cache at Herculaneum, researchers from Brigham-Young have resurrected a number of fragments from the Oxyrhynchus scrolls. Better, less hyperbolic info can be found here.
• There's been a TV series on one of the state-owned channels in Iraq for a few months now, where they take captured insurgents and “interview” them in front of a camera with the goal of making ordinary Iraqis despise them. There's now a bit of controversy, with people saying the prisoners' human rights are being violated, and that the whole thing is scripted since you can see them looking down to read notes:
In his article, Al-Jubouri said that the confessions were made under duress and torture, suggesting that the pieces of paper the suspects occasionally glanced down to read contained a list of crimes they had been forced to admit to.
The General denied the torture accusation and said the suspects had notes because they had committed so many crimes that they couldn’t remember them all, and needed the notes to refresh their memories.
• Astounding optical illusions, such as motion induced blindness. (via MeFi)
• Forget about desktop publishing, screw desktop film-making, and laugh at desktop audio producing. For desktop fabrication is come.
• How did Moussaoui's flight instructor know to contact the FBI?
Moussaoui repeated some of the technical phrases and asked a few questions. Prevost, who flew 747s for Northwest Airlines, smiles and says, “I knew he wasn’t pilot material, because he’d actually read his manuals and he didn’t talk about pussy.”
• MeFites provide links to several methods of maintaining a personal, local copy of the Wikipedia.
• Here's a collection of script writers' jargon, the inevitable sequel, and the comedy writers' spin-off.
• Matt Taibi artfully deconstructs “The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman” :
Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:
I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.
Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.
• How-to start fires with Coke cans and Hershey bars.
• Tricksy Formicidae!
The traps are woven together using hairs stripped from the ants’ host plant and reinforced with fungus, producing a platform with pitted holes. “The ants are always hiding just under the holes, waiting with their mandibles open. When an insect arrives they immediately grab the legs and antennae,” says Orivel. This pulling immobilises the victim, stretching it out as though being tortured on a mediaeval rack.
Worker ants then clamber over their helpless prey, biting and stinging until the victim is paralysed or dead. The carcass is then chopped into small pieces while still on the rack or, more likely, carried back to the leaf pouch to be devoured.
• Ludicorp, the makers of Flickr, are developing a new massively-multiplayer online game called Game Never Ending based on the old LambdaMOO, except this is going to be web-based and, one would imagine, not text-based. It's focused on player interaction and integration with the open web.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 02:06 PM
March 21, 2005
spring break; spring cleaning
So it's a little before 10 AM. I haven't posted anything in 10 days. My spring break just started, and I've been up since 5 in the morning too congested to breathe let alone sleep. Also, I am operating without caffeine—a dangerous state of affairs.
In the process of those 10 days of diligent not-posting I've accreted a good 38 links, all of which are floating on top of my desktop right now. What this means in numbers: Safari and Firefox are utilizing about 25% of my CPU each. Together, these web browsers are guzzling 450MB of physical RAM and 1.6GB of virtual memory, or around a gig a piece. This is going to take awhile.
• Greg Palast has a new investigative report out on Bush administration pre-war plans for Iraq's oil:
The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas.
• Agonistas' favorite aphorisms
• “13 things that do not make sense” is a list of astounding scientific anecdotes that touch on the limits of our current knowledge of the universe. Sadly, why a Wookiee—an 8 foot tall Wookiee—would want to live on Endor with a bunch of two foot tall Ewoks is not addressed.
• In Iran, the spring equinox is celebrated as the holiday of Nowruz. It's full of pagany goodness, like fire-jumping rituals, marriage charms, and, of course, plenty of wheat. I'm tickled by how close parts of it are to the holiday's Jewish analogue, Passover:
On the first day of spring, Nowruz day, families gather around a table set with the Haft seen arrangement of seven items. Each item begins with the letter s in Persian and symbolizes the hoped for happiness, abundance, and health in the New Year.
For example, there is an apple, the Persian word for which is seeb. The fruit symbolizes health and robustness. Garlic (seer) is said to ward off evil and illness. Sprouts of wheat (samanoo) symbolize good crops of growth and plenty, Afkhami said.
• The Daily Howler caught George Will lying his ass off about Social Security.
Well, now I'm down to 30 web browser windows...time for some coffee.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 10:42 AM
February 26, 2005
cleanup
Yeah, I haven't been posting much. Here're some links to balance that out.
• Hunter S. Thompson shot himself dead since my last blog post. Read his obit, and his final column.
• The French...being French:
“It is not a question of despising Anglo-Saxon views ... It is just that in the simple act of making a choice, you impose a certain view of things,” Jeanneney told Reuters in a telephone interview on Friday.
“I favour a multi-polar view of the world in the 21st century,” he said. “I don't want the French Revolution retold just by books chosen by the United States. The picture presented may not be less good or less bad, but it will not be ours.”
• A torrent of some cheesy 1950s promotional videos for DisneyLand, among other things.
• A self-satirizing Reuters article from the Agonist:
Reuters UK - President George W. Bush's uncle, who serves on the board of a U.S. defence contractor with over $100 million in business in Iraq, recently cashed in on some of that lucrative work, a government filing shows.
William H.T. “Bucky” Bush exercised options on 8,438 shares worth about $450,000 from St. Louis-based defence contractor Engineered Support Systems Inc. (ESSI), according to a January 18 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Mr. Bush has been on our board for the past five years and he has absolutely nothing to do with any of our contracts with the U.S. government or anyone else,” said (Dan Kreher, vice president of investor relations for ESSI).
“The fact his (Bush's) nephew is in the White House has absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Bush being on our board or with our stock having gone up 1,000 percent in the past five years either,” Kreher added.
• Stirling Newberry stops by the Agonist to lay out Karl Rove's game plan:
A new Republic is born in debt, and dies in debt, but the two are very different.
In the beginning, the new government draws a connection - it takes on the debt of the old order, but it also creates a different kind of money, one which can grow fast enough and far enough to pay down that debt without crushing taxes and economic deprivation. The agreement to assume revolutionary war debt, the civil war - which was effectively the cost of buying the slaves - and the bank bail out of 1933 are the first. The second - creation of a new kind of money - comes from the Bank of the United States and the Coinage Act; the National Banking system and the gold standard; and, of course, the combination of Federal Reserve, SEC, Deposit insurance and asset based money.
Rove knows that to force the reactionary order, Bush must borrow. He must place a millstone around the necks of the next generation of government, and then make it so that to make those payments, the Republicans must be in charge. If the Democrats take the presidency by accident, the Republican Congress will merely stop doing the behind the scenes financial juggling - of budget borrowing, shuffling of money between accounts, raising the debt ceiling, passing huge unfunded mandates - that keep the economy alive. There will, in such a case, be a massive recession, and the Republicans will take power again. The government will become a massive protection racket, with the public held hostage.
• Speaking of Karl Rove, the 48 Laws of Power have been floating around del.icio.us lately.
• ...and jumping off that, here's how to go about destroying the Earth:
Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.
You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.
Fools.
The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.
This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.
This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:25 PM
January 30, 2005
yay for democracy
The election went to plan.
As in, lots of Kurds voted.
Lots of Shiites voted.
Sunnis? Not so much.
Plenty of pretty pictures on TV...but it seems the press only was allowed to shoot footage at 5 US-designated polling places, 4 moderate Shiite ones, and 1 upper-class Sunni poll.
Now's when we see if Juan Cole knows what he's talking about. What do the Sunnis do now? Do they peacefully accept a government they refused to elect? If they don't, civil war could be a-coming. This isn't a functioning government that was elected today. It's a constitutional assembly. They have next to no real power, except over setting the rules for how power will be granted and distributed. That means they're going to be a focus of violence and upheaval from insurgents set on keeping them from completing their task...and yet, until they complete their task, there's no way for Iraqis to control their country. Nothing's changed from a US perspective, and the rebellion just got a whole lot more serious for the Sunnis. New verse, same as the first.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:03 PM
January 23, 2005
retro blogging
Here are the hottest, freshest links, straight from...last week.
• Spacetime wave orbits black hole
• Human cells communicate using Morse code? [via /.]
• The other day, a friend of mine asked me what the difference was between the two current-generation video ports, DVI and HDMI. I was stumped. A great overview from AnandTech taught me that the difference is HDMI can carry 8 channel audio and 1080p video.
• With the first occurrence of a pop-culture reference on Informed Comment that I can recall, Juan Cole has figured out just why it's so infuriating when Bush answers “Absolutely” to the question “Even without WMDs, was the war in Iraq worthwhile?”
As for “Absolutely,” it is a weasel word. It is not an argument. It is a species of hand waving. It is cheap.
Bush has figured out, apparently, that some in the American public respond, rather like the apes to which they deny they are related, to posture, grunting and body language rather than to reason and evidence. When I see him smirking and gesturing, I can't help thinking of the ape General Thade (Tim Roth) in Tim Burton's remake of the Planet of the Apes, which used scientific findings about primate behavior and hierarchy to inform the acting.
“Absolutely” used in this way is a vocalization that actually functions as an intimidating agonistic display meant to close off further dialogue by the silverback.
• There's something darkly amusing about this quote Dr. Cole sifted out of an Arabic paper:
Farid Ayar said, “We welcome any Jews of Iraqi origin in the polling both, no matter what current nationality, on condition that they not be Israelis. The issue is absolutely not one of origin or religion, but simply that we do not maintain relations with Israel.”
• Why do Republicans hate the Constitution?
Posted by Jon Rubin at 09:39 AM
January 11, 2005
more links than you can shake a stick at
...been awhile, huh? In this post, I'm going to bookmark all the links I have open right now. Some of these, I might want to return to later, in order to comment. Or attribute. So here are lots of links.
• EScummVM lets you play old Sierra games on your Symbian phone.
• Meditation gives the brain a charge. [via Agonist]
• Resident Evil 4 makes the GameCube glimmer:
As screenshots and video indicate, Resident Evil 4 is outstandingly beautiful and proves just how capable Nintendo's hardware is. All character models are rendered with stunning fidelity and animate magnificently. Even character lip-synching looks near flawless, in and out of cutscenes. Weather, fire, and ambient dust effects bring the already stunning environments to life like no other game on the console. And thankfully, the whole experience is presented at a consistent 30 FPS, even when the screen is filled with enemies. Resident Evil 4 is without a doubt one of the finest looking titles available on the GameCube. Put simply, you've never seen heads pop like this before. It's digital violence presented at its finest.
• News stories which are no longer weird.
• Write Till You Drop, Annie Dillard's advice for writers.
• JWZ wonders why wire photographers are obsessed with putting big heads behind little heads.
• Armando at dKos sums up why Democrats are opposed to Gonzales-as-AG.
• Mr. Singh's ultra-efficient internal combustion engine.
• The Washington Post wrote up a definitive profile of Bush's Social Security plans.
• Mat Gross was the first person I saw raise the alarm about the neo-cons' Iraqi death squad plans.
• The Madison Dynamo Experiment
• The British Museum's crystal skull is probably a fake. But how is Nicholas Ballard going to get home now? [via Agonist]
• John August runs an eponymous screenwriting blog.
• A swell MeFi post talks about Peter Suber, the ethics of personal modification, self-modifying machines, and Nomic.
• Google indexes insecure web and security cams.
• Jason Kottke picks his favorite answers to a question posed to Edge members: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?
• Alan Moore once proposed a crossover series of DC comic books that sounds like it would have been even better than Watchmen. It's a beautifully recursive time travel story. [via MeFi]
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:10 PM
January 04, 2005
haphazardly-selected political links
• Now, math has never been my strong suit. But I look at this New York Times article Brad DeLong pointed out, and am struck dumb by the sheer scale of the Bush administration's mendacity and malfeasance:
To show that President Bush can fulfill his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009, White House officials are preparing a budget that will assume a significant jump in revenues and omit the cost of major initiatives like overhauling Social Security.... [A]dministration officials have decided to measure their progress against a $521 billion deficit they predicted last February rather than last year's actual shortfall of $413 billion.... But White House budget planners are not stopping there. Administration officials are also invoking optimistic assumptions about rising tax revenue while excluding costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as trillions of dollars in costs that lie just outside Mr. Bush's five-year budget window.
The five-year plan, due in February, is likely to reaffirm previous predictions of a $217 billion surge in tax revenues in 2005, the biggest one-year jump on record, and almost $800 billion a year by 2009.... As in past years, the budget will exclude costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which could reach $100 billion in 2005 and are likely to remain high for years to come. The budget is also expected to exclude Mr. Bush's goal to replace Social Security in part with a system of private savings accounts, even though administration officials concede that such a plan could require the government to borrow $2 trillion over the next decade or two. Among the costs that are expected in the five years after 2009 are nearly $1 trillion to make Mr. Bush's tax cuts permanent, nearly $500 billion for the new Medicare prescription drug program and at least $400 billion to address widely acknowledged problems with the so-called alternative minimum tax.
• Well, that was a long time in coming. DailyKos has gotten to be a bit uncomfortable since the election. The black box voting freaks are trying on the nerves. To them, every post is an opportunity to snark about how the Democrats would have won the election if people like Kos and Atrios had the balls to forward the fraud story. These people are so naive they think this would have aided their cause, instead of wrecking the reputations of the Democrats' online voices. They also seem incapable of stringing together sentences in such a way that they form a convincing, logical argument. Kos has finally had enough, and he went off on those frellniks. All I can say is bravo, Kos. Bravo:
I will continue to write about whatever I want to write about. And I would like the diaries to remain a free flow of discussion, unimpeded by me or anyone else. But I don't want the increasingly shrill and wacked out fraudster noise harming this site's reputation for reality-based commentary. All it takes is 30 recommendations, sometimes less, to push the latest conspiracy theory into the recommended diaries. And to be frank, it makes us all look bad.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet, but I do think the fraudsters have had two months to make the case that Kerry won the election and have failed to do so.
If we want to talk fraud, then by all means, do so. Reform? The system obviously needs it. But “Kerry won” nonsense? I'm sick of it. I'm sick of Bev Harris, clearly a headcase who has burned every bridge that paved her way to prominance. I'm tired of people trumpetting Madsen's worthless crap (heck, even Bev Harris has disassociated herself from Madsen's drivel).
George Bush won. It may not have been “fair and square”, not when you run a campaign based on lying about your opponent's record, but he did get more votes than our guy, both in the popular column, and in the Electoral College. We hate it. it sucks. But it's reality. You disagree, see point number 1 above -- do something about it, but do it somewhere else.
• The chairwoman of Bush's inaugural festivities got grilled by the New York Times [via Wonkette]:
I hear one of the balls will be reserved for troops who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Yes, the Commander-in-Chief Ball. That is new. It will be about 2,000 servicemen and their guests. And that should be a really fun event for them.
As an alternative way of honoring them, did you or the president ever discuss canceling the nine balls and using the $40 million inaugural budget to purchase better equipment for the troops?
I think we felt like we would have a traditional set of events and we would focus on honoring the people who are serving our country right now -- not just the people in the armed forces, but also the community volunteers, the firemen, the policemen, the teachers, the people who serve at, you know, the -- well, it's called the StewPot in Dallas, people who work with the homeless.
How do any of them benefit from the inaugural balls?
I'm not sure that they do benefit from them.
Then how, exactly, are you honoring them?
Honoring service is what our theme is about.
Do you think President Bush and the first lady like to dance?
I think that probably he enjoys a baseball game maybe a little bit more than dancing.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:45 AM
January 03, 2005
'tween two rivers
• Gregory Djerejian does the world a favor by transcribing an Economist article on Iraq:
Little surprise that the Americans had not visited the nearby smugglers' town of Baij in force for three months, until they rode there one recent night in a convoy of 1,000 troops, with Apache attack helicopters flying overhead. The target was three houses in the town centre which signal intelligence had linked to Mr Zarqawi's group. The Americans had no further intelligence to support their mission except that provided by an informant from the local Ayzidi tribe, America's main ally in the area. This source claimed there was a wounded Yemeni rebel in the town. “I think it should be a great operation,” said Colonel Robert Brown, beforehand. “I think a lot of folks from Fallujah have gone there and we need to go there.”
There was no one in the three targeted houses bar women and children. Baij's police station had been blown up and its police had fled. The town's English-speaking former mayor, Abdullah Fahad, was frank about the town's allegiances. “There are terrorists here, not from Syria, not from Mosul, but from Baij. Some are Baathists and some are Islamists and before they hated each other but now they work together, and they tell people that if they don't work with them they will kill them.”
Mr Fahad, who claimed to have survived several assassination attempts and whose son had been kidnapped, refused to help the Americans on the grounds that he would be murdered if he did. When the American commander offered to protect him, he replied: “Thank you, but you are not always here. This is the first time I have ever seen you.” Whereupon the American troops labelled Mr Fahad a “bad guy”, and debated whether to detain him.
Instead, they detained 70 men from districts identified by their informant as “bad”. In near-freezing conditions, they sat hooded and bound in their pyjamas. They shivered uncontrollably. One wetted himself in fear. Most had been detained at random; several had been held because they had a Kalashnikov rifle, which is legal. The evidence against one man was some anti-American literature, a meat cleaver and a tin whistle. American intelligence officers moved through the ranks of detainees, raising their hoods to take mugshots: “One, two, three, jihaaad!” A middle-tier officer commented on the mission: “When we do this,” he said, “we lose.”
[via Brad DeLong]
• Armando over at dKos reads about the new Zarqawi video, and notes that the man's organization operates so freely that their base has a banner announcing who they are, and opens onto a well-trafficked, public street.
• Lech Walesa, who started the Solidarity movement in Soviet Poland, has given up on America:
“America failed its exam as a superpower,” says Lech Walesa, the former Solidarity trade-union leader who became Poland's first post-Communist president. “They are a military and economic superpower but not morally or politically anymore. This is a tragedy for us.”
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:10 PM
December 31, 2004
sundry political links
• Josh Micah Marshall highlights a statement from Rep. Harold Ford, in which Ford changes course and repudiates any and all plans to privatize Social Security. This is a major victory for JMM; the past few weeks, he's been doing more than anyone else online (I refuse to ever use as awkward and kludgy a term as 'the blogosphere') to herd the Democrats' congressional cats in the right (left?) direction. He's been applying pressure and taking names. Building a database, and checking it twice. Maybe this is naive, but I'd like to think this was instigated by someone in Ford's office reading Josh's open letter to the Rep.
• Kos is pissed off after discovering that Bob Shrum made off with a cool 5 mil of Kerry's campaign coffers:
What isn't unclear is the practice of paying out 15% to media buying firms. The Bush campaign did away with the practice. Corporate America ditched the practice years ago. Yet the Democratic Party is held in thrall by this racket by DC Democratic media consultants.
• Jesse does a better job explaining the Democratic position on Iraq than Kerry could even after paying Shrum all that $$$$$$$:
When I started driving, that tree was not an integral part of my engine block. When I started sliding on the ice, that tree was not an integral part of my engine block. When I woke up and I was picking branches out of my hair, the tree had become an integral part of my engine block.
• ...and as I write this post, Kos provides some nifty breaking Democratic political news; Sen. Feingold, who voted against the Patriot act and is notorious for never following the party line, is going to be one of 4 Democratic Senators in charge of enforcing party loyalty.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:20 PM
wrap-up
I'm resolved to end the year without a plethora of open windows, so, in no particular order, here's a pile of links:
• Kos looks over the grim statistics from Iraq, complete with a helpful AP graphic based on Pentagon figures. It's distressingly similar to those graphics in high school history textbooks that show how Vietnam ramped up.
• Rudy Rucker answers that perennial question about cellular automata: “Yes, but can CAs get me high?”
By trawling the literature, checking with police departments, and even going out into the field and asking people, the two researchers found that the proportion of left-handers in a traditional society is, indeed, correlated with its homicide rate. One of the highest proportions of left-handers, for example, was found among the Yanomamo of South America. Raiding and warfare are central to Yanomamo culture. The murder rate is 4 per 1,000 inhabitants per year (compared with, for example, 0.068 in New York). And, according to Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond, 22.6% of Yanomamo are left-handed. In contrast, Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso in West Africa are virtual pacifists. There are only 0.013 murders per 1,000 inhabitants among them and only 3.4% of the population is left-handed.
• An interesting-looking MetaFilter thread I haven't read yet about societal collapse
• How-to speed up Firefox by enabling pipelining, and why it's not necessarily a good idea.
• The creator of optical storage lives a life unsung. [via Slashdot]
• Jewish genes are closely related to Kurdish genes.
• An AskMe thread on The Great Vowel Shift
• There are a lot of published authors on MetaFilter.
• How-to hack an iPod to record audio.
• A J2ME Bluetooth hacking program that can run on Symbian/Series 60? Is this for real?
Okay, now I'm going to do a more politically-oriented batch...
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:52 AM
December 28, 2004
is obl inept at politics?
Juan Cole posted an intriguing item this morning about Bin Laden's most recent vid. Dr. Cole argues that:
Bin Laden's intervention in Iraq was hamfisted and clumsy, and will benefit the United States and the Shiites enormously. Most Iraqi Muslims, Sunni or Shiite, dislike the Wahhabi branch of Islam prevalent in Saudi Arabia, and with which Bin Laden is associated. Nationalistic Iraqis will object to a foreigner interfering in their national affairs.
The heart of the piece is:
It appears that Bin Laden is so weak now that he is forced to play to his own base, of Saudi and Salafi jihadists, some of whom are volunteer guerrillas in Iraq. They are the only ones in Iraq who would be happy to see this particular videotape.
[....] It is a desperate, crackpot hope. The narrow, sectarian and politically unskilfull character of this speech is the most hopeful sign I have seen in some time that al-Qaeda is a doomed political force, a mere Baader-Meinhof Gang or Red Army Faction with greater geographical reach.
Were I not cynical, I'd like to think that Dr. Cole's analysis is correct, and OBL is on political life support. I certainly trust Juan Cole's words more than those of most other pundits. I just prefer to be cautious.
What strikes me, though, is how different mind-sets will read Cole's post different ways. The armchair generals over on the Bush side will use it as further proof of how unserious liberals are when it comes to terrorism. They'll probably misquote Kerry again about a “nuisance.”
But Dr. Cole isn't blowing off the threat of terrorism. He's simply looking at OBL calmly, objectively, and firmly grounded in historical, geographical, religious, and political contexts. The mass media sells us an image of OBL as a scheming super villain carefully plotting a “Clash of Civilizations.” Dr. Cole's just cutting through the hype, and exhibiting the desperate zealot hidden behind the curtain.
Then Bush partisans will claim, but wait, if Osama is so weakened and isolated, isn't that a clear victory for Bush's war on terror?
And sure, it is...if at one point, OBL was a scheming super villain, and not just a desperate zealot who got lucky...
...Of course, I'm not trying to discount the destruction a desperate zealot can cause. I'm merely questioning whether we're fighting a war against the enemy we face, or against the “Clash of Civilizations” the neo-cons desire. And yes, that question is quite definitely rhetorical.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:02 PM
December 27, 2004
civil war rising
Armando over at DailyKos catches an important, troubling story out of Iraq:
The largest Sunni Muslim political party in the country announced Monday that it was withdrawing from the ballot. The withdrawal of the Iraqi Islamic Party leaves the interim government and its U.S. backers unable to point to a single major, established Sunni entity on the Jan. 30 ballot.
As Juan Cole continuously, and correctly points out:
The new parliament will double as a constitutional convention.
The members of parliament will have to make hard decisions about the fate of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which is claimed by both Kurds and Arabs, and about the place of religious law in the new state.
To exclude Sunni Arabs from such discussions is a recipe for civil war.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:27 AM
Jesse almost made me spew coffee out my nose
Jesse Taylor gives a Christmas present to the world by “trying to chisel out the National Review vision of the war in Iraq, namely how it should have been/should be fought.”
He ends with a just so quote:
The Hanson/Ledeen Theory Of War
At such point as a threat allegedly faces America, we are justified in committing to whatever fuckwitted halfassery we can get away with so long as we can cite five to ten factoids about World War II with tangential relevance to the current situation.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:23 AM
December 24, 2004
random political links
• After reading that Bush's approval rating is going to be lower at his inauguration than that of any previous POTUS, Kos wants to know What the hell happened. I love posts like this from Kos. He lays it all out, and lets everything hang out. As he says, “we have nothing to lose,” so why not be frank?
What to make of these numbers? First of all, Karl Rove got screwed by Time Magazine. He deserved that Man of the Year award after selling this lemon to the American people.
But what makes me angry was Kerry and his gang's inability to take advantage of the situation. I may regret saying this later, but fuck it -- they should be lined up and shot. There's no reason they should've lost to this joker. “I voted for the $87 billion, then I voted against it.” That wasn't nuance. That was idiocy. And with a primary campaign that consisted entirely of “I'm the most electable”, Kerry entered the general without a core philosophy or articulated vision for the job.
I could deal with losing to a popular incumbent. But it's tough to deal with the most unpopular incumbent to win reelection.
Of course, there's a silver lining to all of this. A Kerry presidency would've been an unmitigated disaster, with a hostile congress, budget woes, the mess in Iraq, etc. Not a good time to be in charge. Those Supreme Court seats would've been nice (whoever we would've been able to push through a hostile Senate), but we've got an opportunity for long-term gain.
• Bush shatters vows, slashes international food aid budget by $100 million. [via Agonist]
• Fannie Mae execs given the boot, $9 billion missing. [via Agonist]
• The Mosul mess hall tragedy falls at Halliburtons' feet.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 01:05 PM
December 21, 2004
Bad news
I've been distancing myself from posting major headline stories here, on the assumption that anyone reading this will have already heard major news, but some events are just too horrible to ignore:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - At least 22 people were killed and 50 others wounded when rockets and mortars struck a dining hall at a U.S. military base in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, U.S. defense officials said on Tuesday.
How are free, fair, open elections to be held next month, when we can't even guard our forces while they sit down to eat in their own base?
Posted by Jon Rubin at 11:07 AM
December 13, 2004
What's Next for the Bush Administration?
With the Electoral College voting today, Bush's win is official. So what are they going to do now? Three stories on the Agonist caught my eye:
• The Washington Post reports that Frist is going to take another stab at going nuclear in the Senate. Right now it takes 60 Senators to break a filibuster. The Republicans only have 55 seats, so they want it to only take 51 votes to force cloture.
• The editor of the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol, is urging Bush to hit Syria with airstrikes and invade Syria with ground forces from across the border in Iraq.
• But the Undersecretary of State, the odious John Bolton, pushes for conflict with another of Iraq's border buddies, the ever-popular Iran. He wants to stop all negotiations with Tehran and instead drag them before the Security Council. Bolton is fully aware that we wouldn't be able to round up enough votes at the UN to sanction Iran. So why all the theatrics? As always, the drama is for the American public; just like with Iraq, part of ginning up jingoism is showing that the rest of the world 'refuses' to act.
• via MetaFilter, Americans in Iraq are leaking to the US press that logistics are going to impede holding elections on time.
• And Atrios notes that, with the US election over, the Bush administration feels it can be a little more upfront about how much our Mesopotamian Adventure is going to cost: $100 billion over and above previous estimates.
• At least conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan is having a good time according to Wonkette's eyes and ears:
I saw journalist/bear Andrew Sullivan at DC gay bar JR's last Monday [11/29]. He came with an entourage of fellow flannel wearing, no shaving, mid-30s gay men. I'm sure he seems nice and all on Chris Matthews, but when he's giving you the hungry eyes from across the bar while singing everyword to ABBA's Dancing Queen, it can be down right disturbing.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:05 PM
December 09, 2004
Another batch of links
I really want to install the latest OS X security update. Before doing that, I have to close out all the windows I have open in Safari. Here's my first attempt to do that. Some of these links I've read, some I haven't. Some are serious and boring, others are shallow and faintly entertaining. Not much attribution, since I've had some of these floating around my screen for around a week now.
• In Orlando, Clearchannel Outdoor, the billboard division of the radio behemoth, has put up a “political public service message.” On the left is a photo of Dubya. It reads: “GEORGE W. BUSH” and underneath that “Our Leader.” The period at the end of that sentence fragment is undeniably stylish, but the first adjective that pops into my head is “Orwellian.” An Afghani wireless company has put up a similar billboard in Kabul, following Karzai's win in the shaky Afghanistan election. That sign has a resolute photo of Karzai on the center left, and reads (in English!): “Your nation. Your choice. Your leader. Hamid Karzai.” [Our Leader via everywhere, Your Leader via Eschaton]
• Fox refused to air two of the Swift Boat Liars' anti-Kerry ads because they were “too negative.” Strangely, that didn't stop them from discussing the ads nonstop on the air... [via Wonkette, I think]
• Ezra analyzes the use of Lakoff-style framing to portray Republicans as irresponsible in Dean's big speech the other day. I've got one of Lakoff's books (the biggy, Moral Politics, not the Don't Think of an Elephant pamphlet he published to cash in on the election) and over winter break, I'll probably end up reading it. I respect Lakoff for all his work on how linguistics shape our sense of reality, so I'm looking forward to learning some useful lessons. However, Oliver Willis and Mathew Gross probably know what they're talking about when they say to take Lakoff with a grain of salt—politics ain't academia.
• Jerome Armstrong at My Due Diligence spotlights a line graph that shows how terribly fatalities in Iraq have been escalating, complete with dots to signify important events in the war, like Bush saying “Bring 'em on,” Saddam's capture, and the 'handover' of power. [this window has been up on my computer for over six days, so I have no clue where I found it. Maybe Eschaton]
• Owner of Munchies Pizza outside Philly arrested for selling over a pound of weed and Percocet to undercovers. [via Fark, of course]
• Wonkette had the best line after Rumsfeld flubbed that question from an enlisted about “Where the hell are our armored vehicles?!”:
“You have to dig through the landfills,” Rumsfeld replied, “because we're conducting an experiment in nation-building that has neither gone as planned nor was really planned for very well. Now we are trapped in an intractable ground war with an insurgency we created. Oh, and we're fighting it using a woefully understaffed, undersupplied fighting force we deployed on erroneous assumptions. We fucked up, Tommy. Now I must ask you to re-enlist.”
Ha-ha. We kid, of course. Rumsfeld would never admit to anything like that. And they don't “ask” you to re-enlist anymore.
• Flash iPod rumors gain ground after report that Toshiba's cut a deal to supply Apple with flash memory.
• An awesome post about how the nervous system maps to the body, complete with killer 3d model of what we'd look like if the size of organs depended on how many nerves run through them, and why feet are sexy.
• This link I haven't read, but it's a theory that the legend of King Arthur migrated to England from Eastern Europe (and maybe further East) with the Celts.
• Here's a MeFi post on how Bev Harris, the woman behind BlackBoxVoting.org (which publicized how easy it is to hack into Diebold voting systems) has been banned from DemocraticUnderground.com. Perhaps more useful is the first link in the comments, to a lecture on how “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.” I haven't read either yet, so no claims of quality. A related link would be this Wired story about how that Berkeley study that claimed there were definite irregularities in Florida's vote totals has been ripped to shreds.
• Here is a succession of varied Agonist posts: A caption contest for Bush's new fascistic costume; Khmer Rouge guerillas who'd been hiding in the jungle since 1979 finally get the news that Pol Pot is dead; Hardee's burger exceeds the daily caloric limit; Tom DeLay does some good for once by scrounging up some cash for NASA; the Bush campaign hired marketing consultants to niche voting blocs and discovered Democrats watch more TV; Stephen Roach is worried about the housing bubble; and, finally, good science books and gifts.
Well, that was around half of my open windows. More later.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 02:13 PM
December 07, 2004
Buffering...Buffering...
Okay, I finally finished catching up on the news, with the exception of 100 Fark links. I've got about 37 quintillion windows open right now, so here's a grab bag of them:
• Juan Cole lays on the snark:
Uh, John, when you have conquered a country and ruled it for 18 months, and when you have 140,000 plus troops on the ground, and when you have to forbid your embassy staff to take the 10-mile-long road from the capital to the airport because their lives cannot be assured on it-- then, John, things are deteriorating and may not get better soon. Get used to it.
• Via Wonkette (I think. See above, 37 quintillion windows), a cute little anecdote that follows up the best sight gag on Sunday's Simpsons episode:
So [Roger Ailes] couldn't have been happy Sunday night when another member of the Fox television family - “The Simpsons” - featured a Fox News satellite truck sporting a huge Bush-Cheney bumper sticker while the rock group Queen's classic “We Are the Champions” blared over the soundtrack.
Ailes didn't return my phone call yesterday.
But my pal Tom Shales, the esteemed television critic of The Washington Post, E-mailed that the wicked sendup was “pretty ballsy since 'The Simpsons' plays on the Fox network, but it also shows how firm is the image of Fox News as Bush whores.”
“Simpsons” executive producer Al Jean responded: “Shales said that, not me.”
Wow, I just noticed the New York Post's crappy grammar. The Simpsons is a series title, not an episode title, and should never be put in quotations. Yeah, I'm a grammar pedant.
• I love when Atrios does posts like this; there are few better ways to cut through spin than to exhibit a gallery of it. Follow the link, and see how, be it summer of last year or today, we're always within 12 months of an Iraqi security force taking over from the coalition.
• Supposedly, this (mirror from /. after original site was /.'d) is the new Apple flash memory iPod. I doubt it, though. Not for the philosophical reasons Daring Fireball listed the other day, but because:
- I can't see Apple using a standard firewire cable as the connector, when they've been moving away from that ever since the 2G iPod.
- No screen? WTF?
- Fast-forward, rewind, and volume up and down buttons but no play or pause? I know it could work, you'd just click down to play, but come on. Apple loves identifying symbols.
That's all for now. I still have many-a-browser window open, but I'm coming to realize I haven't gotten around to reading the rest yet...
Posted by Jon Rubin at 01:30 PM
Sundries
Uh, yeah. I was kinda busy this morning/afternoon. When that happens, I end up behind on my news reading all day. I'm still not quite caught up now.
In the mean time, enjoy some more browser windows I have open right now:
• Brad DeLong puts on his classics scholar hat:
We can see how the Greeks viewed Agamemnon and Achilles by looking at the history of the Macedonian conquest. Alexander set out to consciously emulate Achilles. And his father Philip--After the battle of Chaeronea, he refused to allow the defeated Athenians to bury their dead. One of the Athenian prisoners then said: “Lord King, the Gods have cast you in the role of Agamemnon. But you are playing it as if you were Thersites.” And Philip laughed and relented: to compare someone to Agamemnon in fourth-century Greece was high praise.
• As a Mac user, when I heard IBM was looking to sell its PC business to some Chinese manufacturer, the first thought that popped in my head was “Ha ha suckers. You lose!” Because, ya gotta admit, who would have expected to Apple to tough out the computer business longer than IBM? Now, there's (groundless) speculation that after selling off its manufacturing unit, IBM might hook up with Apple and sell Cupertino's (already IBM-powered) computers to the business world.
• NYTimes via Wonkette, a choice Dick Gephart quote:
“I like Nelly. He's from St. Lous. He's a very good rapper.”
• The new version of VoodooPad is shiny. I think I'll register it tomorrow, now that it can display backlinks.
• Via Atrios, Steve Gilliard sees much wrong with what we're doing in Fallujah, after reading an article that explains part of the plan:
One idea that has stirred debate among Marine officers would require all men to work, for pay, in military-style battalions. Depending on their skills, they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons.
• Christian Science Monitor via Agonist:
Tax returns are among the most sensitive documents the United States government holds on an individual - and it guards them closely. IRS agents face firing, five years in jail, and big fines for “willful disclosure” of tax information. Even the CIA and FBI have to get court approval to see individuals' returns.
Now, the IRS is preparing to assign late next year $13 billion in owed taxes to private companies for collection.
• Seen at Slashdot and Eschaton, 99.8% of complaints to the FCC are coming from one conservative action group, led by Brent Bozell.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 12:16 AM
December 05, 2004
A little over 2 years ago
Atrios links to an old Gallup poll from before the 2002 elections, when the war with Iraq was still a tingle in Karl Rove's pants. He does so to point out:
22. Question: Would you favor or oppose invading Iraq with U.S. ground troops in an attempt to remove Saddam Hussein from power if you knew that — -
A. There would be 100 U.S. casualties.
51/42
B. 1000 casualties
46/48
C. 5000 casualties
33/60
Pretty astounding, huh? The election makes a little more sense after that statistic. Outrage is still within the margin of error of a majority. We haven't quite reached the tipping point of public opinion. But look at the horrible numbers: 13 US military fatalities already this month; 140 coalition military fatalities last month; 1,270 US military fatalities over all; 1416 total fatalities for the coalition. Things are just going to get worse. Sunday, south of Baghdad, the Sunnis and the Shiites had their first real battle. Unless the elections go perfectly according to plan, which I don't consider a realistic possibility, civil war is looking more and more likely.
Anyway, that's why Atrios found the poll interesting. Me? I saw some other numbers there.
Bush's approval ratings in October of 2002 were 64 approve to 33 disapprove, among those always-nebulous likely voters. So it's calming to sit back for a moment and realize that, no matter what, Bush has lost ground, and no matter what, Kerry did way better than anyone could have expected two years prior. Similarly, at the time, Bush was winning against an unnamed Democrat 53:37 among likely voters.
So Kerry did better than unnamed Democrat. That's something, I guess. But how come he couldn't, you know, win?
Iraq.
The poll helpfully asked “In your view, who should have the final authority for deciding whether the United States should invade Iraq with ground troops—Congress or Bush?” 54 to 38, likely voters said Congress had final authority. Now, I know that's not true. There's that War Powers Act. I'm not a big fan of it. But it's there. However. What's important in this instance is not fact, but the minds of American voters. And in them, Congress, apparently, never gave up its Constitutional power. Maybe it's denial, maybe it's ignorance, but can you see why Kerry looked disingenuous out there carping against the war he voted for?
Kerry voted for the war, because, as this same poll shows, a clear majority of Americans supported invading Iraq. But, interestingly, a majority did not support the Bush Doctrine. 50 to 41, like voters thought America “should not attack unless attacked first.”
I'm not sure all of that painted a clear picture, but it's what I took away from the Gallup poll.
Posted by Jon Rubin at 07:31 PM