Cosmic Variance: A physics blog?!

Cosmic Variance

Arguments about string theory and created universes. All Caltech alumni are hereby summoned to this feed ... (Even the english majors did a semester of QM -- physics runs deep in our blood.)

Warning: this blog is addictive to certain people, the posts are long, and they don't read quickly. Get your coffee and an easy chair ready. They are not technical, however -- they're written for a general audience.

Why didn't the bombs blow up?

BBC NEWS | UK | Police issue bomb suspect images

A bad batch of explosives? A rush job? Some speculate that there was great cleverness involved, but it's more likely to have been incompetence:

BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the devices were so similar there was speculation they could have been part of the same batch.

'The explosive might have degraded over time or had not been put together right in this case, or it could have been a completely different batch of explosives - homemade - that had not been cooked up properly.'

The bombers' plan might have been disrupted by the investigation into the 7 July attacks, forcing them to act before they had been fully prepared, Corera added.

Some witnesses said the Thursday's attackers seemed 'scared' or 'surprised' when their bombs failed to explode properly.

It must be a rather peculiar feeling to detonate a suicide bomb -- and live. There is still the unlikely possibility that someone sabotaged the attack.

The Transparent Society lives: surveillance images of bombers

BBC NEWS | UK | Police issue bomb suspect images

David Brin, author of 'The Transparent Society' really ought to be a part of today's interview circuit. Too bad the media isn't more imaginative.

This is the world he predicted, a world of ubiquitous surveillance and crimes that are solved within hours. These images have had minimal processing, but I don't doubt they will identify the attackers. Within a few years processed images will show the size of their pupils.

Why don't we know yet why "they" hate us?

Why Do They Hate Us? Not Because of Iraq - New York Times

Olivier Roy thinks "they" [al-Qaeda's army] hate us for cultural reasons, not religious reasons:

It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.

What was true for the first generation of Al Qaeda is also relevant for the present generation: even if these young men are from Middle Eastern or South Asian families, they are for the most part Westernized Muslims living or even born in Europe who turn to radical Islam. Moreover, converts are to be found in almost every Qaeda cell: they did not turn fundamentalist because of Iraq, but because they felt excluded from Western society (this is especially true of the many converts from the Caribbean islands, both in Britain and France)...

...The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations. And their vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are.

Other writers think it's our policies -- change our policies, forget Israel, leave Iraq, don't meddle -- and the attacks will stop. They make good arguments too, though they sometimes tend to reference the Iraqi insurgency rather than to al-Qaeda itself. There may be more than one class of reason to hate America and the UK.

Four years ago, I put together a post-9/11 model that included many contributing factors to the hatred equation. It had some similarity to typical crime models - motive + capability + opportunity. I thought then, and still think, that fear of feminism is a "significant" (10%?) contributor to "motive" -- but there seems to have been no testing of any model, much less my amateur effort.

The interesting questions is then -- why do we seem to have made little significant progress on this key question? Is there no body of research and analysis? No attempt to create and test predictive models? Why didn't Bush fund a 'Manhattan Project' of social science research to understand the enemy? Did he think it was only necessary to crush them with overwhelming force?

What idiots we are. The cost of havoc continues to fall as technology disseminates new and old knowledge; we must either kill all who might hate us (a futile and evil goal) or convince them to hate us much less. (If all we did was convince us to hate us 50% less, the falling cost of attack would overwhelm such seemingly significant gains.) Can we win by increasing educational opportunity? By hiding western feminism from view? By showing impressive brutality? By letting the global economy work things out? By accelerating social transformations and gritting our teeth as Gulf societies become more technocentric? These are not irrelevant questions. We ought to have better data and more reason.

Instead we have faith-based government, and the power of the Will. History will not forgive us for re-electing George W. Bush.

How can we get grown-up leaders?

BBC NEWS | UK | London attackers 'meant to kill'

London is attacked again, though in a rather odd fashion. (Was the attack sabotaged?)

Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, basically says (via NPR) that there are really no magical solutions and that everyone will have to make do. Things will be done, but they will not fix the problems. Promising technical solutions (explosive sniffers) are still years away.

If an American politician said such things they'd be tarred, feathered, and fired.

I suppose to get grown-up leaders, we'd first have to grow-up ourselves.

Backing up OS X 10.4 using Retrospect Professional for Windows

Support for OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Clients?

Dantz's Retrospect Professional for Windows can be used to backup up OS X, Mac Classic or PC client machines. Their web site doesn't say whether it can backup up a 10.4 (Tiger) client. In this thread an expert says that one can install the Retrospect 6.0/Mac client on a Tiger machine and it will work.

I'll give it a try.

The end of all the prayer studies

Skeptico: Prayer still useless

This is a remarkable review of studies that have claimed to show prayer altered disease outcomes. There had been some poorly done and very small studies that suggested an effect, so it was worth doing some larger studies. The results of the larger studies are all negative.

Prayer to alter the course of disease doesn't work. What effect there was appears to have been a combination of poor study design, data mining for correlations, and perhaps some publication bias (negative studies by persons seeking positive results may not have been published).

I think that theists should find these results reassuring. I would be disturbed if a God were responding to such pleas; it is one thing to live in a world of freedom and suffering, another to live in a world of suffering that God could alleviate -- if He felt like it. For the people He liked.

Pray to God for wisdom, or for help to bear the pains of the world, or for faith or tolerance or greater compassion. Pray not, however, to be spared the pain of our world.

A new Microsoft?

Lawrence Lessig: Microsoft releases RSS extensions using a Creative Commons License

Microsoft gives something away in order to grow an industry that benefits them?!

Yes, it might be good business practice, but even self-serving charity is not what built Microsoft. They must be feeling a need to change...

The Economist: what makes a murderous zealot?

Muslim extremism in Europe | The enemy within | Economist.com

This is an exceptional article, it must have been in development for some time. The Economist has summarized the most recent thinking on what makes some people fodder for extremist organizations.

I found a few themes to be of particular interest. One is that the recruits are often drawn first to the cause, and secondly they seek out a murderous mentor. In other words, they are not recruited by an individual, they are recruited by a meme. Personal failures, and in particular fear of dominance by females, are often precipitating factors. Poverty is not so important as personal alienation from family and society.

The role of electronic media in distributing these memes, and in facilitating discovery and communication, is critical. The Internet, of course, has an important facilitating role. It is the communication with an experienced mentor, often mediated by the Internet, which transforms ineffectual but motivated zealots into effective killers.

One of my college hobbies was accepting invitations to attend cult gatherings (Eckankar, Moonies, etc -- Scientology was too creepy for me). I liked meeting these rather different people, and seeing what made them join the cult. Most of what I saw in those cults 25 years ago is reiterated in this article.

Recommended. I would also like to point out that a picture I drew almost four years ago is fairly compatible with this article (note the "female" circle and cultural dislocation).

EarthLink� Wireless Service

EarthLink Wireless Service with Treo%u2122 650 - FAQ

Earthlink is a national ISP; they bought Mindspring back in the 1990s. MindSpring was the second ISP I used (I started out with an obscure company in Colorado back before commercial ISP services were really established); I still have a Mindspring address and thus a connection to Earthlink.

Earthlink now sells cellular service. They're not so different from Sprint, except they have better data plans. I suspect they're using Sprint's network; they're CDMA and the coverage map looks like Sprint's (there's no analog roam though!). I'd give it a look, except I'm waiting to see what Apple does in the next 2-3 months.

They feature the Treo 650 and the BlackBerry 7250.

You are a robot

A Gene for Romance? So It Seems (Ask the Vole) - New York Times

Yes, you are a robot. Perhaps not even conscious in the simplistic way some think of consciousness. This NYT article provides a good update on the way behaviors are coded and executed in fruit flies and voles; an execution as structured and predictable as that of your desktop computer -- including a sort of modular software architecture.

It's extremely likely the same mechanisms program us. To me the most extraordinary finding, however, was how early life experience can alter temperament through persistent changes in gene expression:

A remarkable instance of genome-environment interaction has been discovered in the maternal behavior of rats. Pups that receive lots of licking and grooming from their mothers during the first week of life are less fearful in adulthood and more phlegmatic in response to stress than are pups that get less personal care. Last year, Michael J. Meaney and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal reported that a gene in the brain of the well-groomed pups is chemically modified during the grooming period and remains so throughout life. The modification makes the gene produce more of a product that damps down the brain's stress response.

So a gene can be modified such that it permanently alters temperament, eh? Hmm. What possibilities does that suggest? How about a gene bearing virus that renders a population permanently ... cooperative ...

Terrorism: no more profiling

Salon.com News | The enemy is closer than we think:

This is fascinating. I didn't know that years ago the Israelis had written off profiling as useless:

It raises a key point: As the Israelis have already said in the context of suicide terrorism there, it's essentially impossible to profile. Keep in mind, this isn't the first evidence of this. There was the time when two British Muslims went to Israel in 2003 and carried out a suicide attack on Mike's Place, a bar on the Tel Aviv waterfront. They appeared to be similarly assimilated and well-adjusted; one was a graduate of the London School of Economics and was married and had children. So on the one hand you have people like Richard Reid [the convicted 'shoe bomber'], a juvenile delinquent who spent much of his young adult life in prison, where he converted to Islam; and on the other you have a graduate of a leading British university.

With these four suicide bombers, what I find both striking and alarming is that it isn't a matter of one size fits all. You've got an 18-year-old, you've got somebody who was a teacher; you have three of Pakistani origin, but also someone from the Caribbean. This is a particular problem in the United Kingdom; when you talk about rounding up the usual suspects, the short list is pretty long. There are the various immigrant communities, but also the phenomenon of British converts to Islam -- people of color, but also not.

This comes out the same day that Homeland Security announces they'll use more profiling when checking airline passengers. Sigh. It's fortunate that airline security is far less important than rugged cockpit doors. All the same, Homeland Security's decision will make air travel somewhat less safe in the US.

During WW II we had terribly smart people working on the Manhattan project and in communications and security. Where are those people now? Perhaps they would find the Bush administration to be unwelcoming.

This is a good article.

Stephen Roach: Inflation is outside the control of the Federal Reserve?

Morgan Stanley

Another of those famous Stephen Roach columns: "Is inflation global or local? That is a key aspect of the macro debate, which is now moving to center stage in financial markets. Generations of economists, policymakers, and investors are trained to look at inflation as a closed-economy phenomenon, driven by the “cost mark-up” models of yesteryear. However, as an unmistakably powerful convergence of inflation rates around the world suggests, globalization argues for a different approach. Country-specific inflation calls are increasingly becoming global inflation calls."

If inflation is global, then who's the World's Banker? Probably the US Federal Reserve for now.

Frank Rich: Sure Rove did it, but that's a distraction

Follow the Uranium - New York Times

Frank Rick is the best political writer in America today.

WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper's e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove's own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994 Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught.

Even so, we shouldn't get hung up on him - or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players...

... So put aside Mr. Wilson's February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. It was Mr. Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time." The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on "Meet the Press," in three speeches in August and on "Meet the Press" yet again in September. Along the way the frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix.

By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But hardly had Mr. Bush done so than, offstage, out of view of us civilian spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson. In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department's caveat that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa," made public in a British dossier, were "highly dubious." A C.I.A. assessment, sent to the White House that month, determined that "the evidence is weak" and "the Africa story is overblown."...

... the administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.

... by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora's box it can't slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to protect the king.

Krugman is very good, but Rich is a better writer. He's come a long way from his career as a theater critic. I thought his aside on Novak showed his heritage in theater ...

Another bogus subplot, long popular on the left, has it that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, gave Mr. Novak a free pass out of ideological comradeship. But Mr. Fitzgerald, both young (44) and ambitious, has no record of Starr- or Ashcroft-style partisanship (his contempt for the press notwithstanding) or known proclivity for committing career suicide. What's most likely is that Mr. Novak, more of a common coward than the prince of darkness he fashions himself to be, found a way to spill some beans and avoid Judy Miller's fate. That the investigation has dragged on so long anyway is another indication of the expanded reach of the prosecutorial web.

Common coward. Those words come from someone who understands the power of words, and can wield them with cruelty and precision.

Would Rove's defenders also have defended Jonathan Randel?

CNN.com - It doesn't look good for Karl Rove - Jul 15, 2005

John Dean (yes, that John Dean) writes of a precedent that will be discussed in any prosecution of Karl Rove:

I am referring to the prosecution and conviction of Jonathan Randel. Randel was a Drug Enforcement Agency analyst, a Ph.D. in history, working in the Atlanta office of the DEA. Randel was convinced that British Lord Michael Ashcroft (a major contributor to Britain's Conservative Party, as well as American conservative causes) was being ignored by DEA and its investigation of money laundering. (Lord Ashcroft is based in South Florida and the off-shore tax haven of Belize.)

Randel leaked the fact that Lord Ashcroft's name was in the DEA files, and this fact soon surfaced in the London news media. Ashcroft sued, and learned the source of the information was Randel. Using his clout, soon Ashcroft had the U.S. attorney in pursuit of Randel for his leak.By late February 2002, the Department of Justice indicted Randel for his leaking of Lord Ashcroft's name. It was an eighteen count 'kitchen sink' indictment; they threw everything they could think of at Randel.

Most relevant for Karl Rove's situation, count one of Randel's indictment alleged a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 641. This is a law that prohibits theft (or conversion for one's own use) of government records and information for non-governmental purposes. But its broad language covers leaks, and it has now been used to cover just such actions.

Randel, faced with a life sentence (actually 500 years) if convicted on all counts, on the advice of his attorney, pleaded guilty to violating Section 641. On January 9, 2003, Randel was sentenced to a year in a federal prison, followed by three years probation. This sentence prompted the U.S. attorney to boast that the conviction of Randel made a good example of how the Bush administration would handle leakers.

The last sentence of course, is irrelevant to the Bush administration. They are utterly ruthless and wouldn't recognize the truth if they ran into it. The legal precedent, however, is interesting. Bush needs to get the right people on the Supreme Court as quickly as possible -- though you'd think he could rely on the team that stole Gore's presidency.