Venus - the eruptive planet

The BBC has a good summary of the planet Venus. Science has moved on since last I read of Venus. The climate seems to be driven by vulcanism, in a few hundred million years it might cool off a bit and become 'interesting'.

Can we learn anything from the riots in France?

France is plagued with riots. France has had historic problems with rioting of all sorts, but so have we. Our demographics may be different (older population), but I wonder if we'll see something like this hear in a few years. Most administrations would be asking that question and thinking of ways to avert problems. I doubt Bush will do anything.

Update: A BBC editorial provides invaluable context. It's routine to burn 20-30 cars in those suburbs on a weekend?! Huh? France is portrayed as far more troubled than the Economist's routine narratives. Another point against The Economist for not having reported on these issues over the past few years. That journal is a shell of its old self.

Risks of old web pages -- linking to a wife swapping site

I have a lot of old web pages. I'm not quite sure what to do with them. They're still read and still apparently useful -- today's computing world is a much more diverse mixture of old and new than most people realize. There are a lot of Windows 98 machines still running, and web pages written in response to problems of years ago still get read. (I don't track readership, but I get 'thank you' emails on pages I'd have thought were of purely historic interest.)

There's a catch to these old pages however. They contains links to reference materials, and the linked sites change. For example, my old Wireless Home Local Area Network linked to the "HomeRF site". Except as a kind person tells me, the HomeRF site has ummm ... changed ....

Thanks for writing and advising about your experience setting up a complicated home lan.

... I just wanted to advise you your ... to "Home RF Working Group" points to a wife swapping site...

Sorry, the link is gone now.

Why do these old domain names get reused? There are two reasons, one obvious and one a bit more subtle. The obvious one is errant links. Good way to get hits. The subtle one is the Google effect. Many of my old pages have reasonable Google rankings. So the things they point to inherit those rankings. The wife swapping site that inherited the HomeRF link will rank more highly than its competition because I (unwittingly) linked to it. So the site wins two ways: by unintended referral and by increasing its rankings.

At the very least I need to remove most of the links on those old pages that are outside of my own control.

Going down, coming up: The Economist and Newsweek

The Economist describes Libby's perjury as a "technicality". That regurgitation of Bush propaganda wouldn't mean much if it was an isolated incident, but it's part of a four year pattern. The Economist seems to have been invaded and acquired by Wall Street Journal cast-offs.

I've read about 90% of what the Economist has published over the past twenty years. They are in decline now.

On the other hand, I happened to read Newsweek's Libby/Cheney coverage on an airplane. I've not read Newsweek since I was a child, when it had degenerated into a variant of People magazine. This article was different. It put Libby's behavior into a convincingly romantic context of the 'honorable soldier against the apocalypse, making a kind of sense of a claustrophobic world of fear, loyalty and self-delusion.

The Atlantic is another magazine that's come up in the world. It may well be time for me to swap The Economist for Newsweek and The Atlantic.

PS. Newsweek gets extra credit for being the first Cheney/Libby coverage I've read that recalls Cheney's conviction that Sadaam was about to attack the US with smallpox. It was really smallpox Cheney feared more than a nuclear weapon. It was their conspiracy with Judith Miller to sell the Iraq smallpox threat that was Cheney's great crime. It turned out his "evidence" was delusional.

Chemical weapons ring America

We are surrounded by chemical weapons -- which US forces deposited from 1945-1970

KRT Wire | 11/03/2005 | Decades of dumping chemical arms leave a risky legacy

... The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste - either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.

These weapons of mass destruction virtually ring the country, concealed off at least 11 states - six on the East Coast, two on the Gulf Coast, California, Hawaii and Alaska. Few, if any, state officials have been informed of their existence.

The chemical agents could pose a hazard for generations. The Army has examined only a few of its 26 dump zones and none in the past 30 years.

The Army can't say exactly where all the weapons were dumped from World War II to 1970. Army records are sketchy, missing or were destroyed.

More dumpsites likely exist. The Army hasn't reviewed World War I-era records, when ocean dumping of chemical weapons was common.

... Overseas, more than 200 fishermen over the years have been burned by mustard gas pulled on deck. A fisherman in Hawaii was burned in 1976, when he brought up an Army-dumped mortar round full of mustard gas.

It seems unlikely that the weapons will begin to wash up on shore, but last year's discovery that a mustard-gas-filled artillery shell was dumped off New Jersey was ominous for several reasons:

It was the first ocean-dumped chemical weapon to somehow make its way to U.S. shores.

It was pulled up with clams in relatively shallow water only 20 miles off Atlantic City. The Army had no idea that chemical weapons were dumped in the area.

Most alarming: It was found intact in a residential driveway in Delaware.

It had survived, intact, after being dredged up and put through a crusher to create cheap clamshell driveway fill sold throughout the Delmarva Peninsula.

The Army's secret ocean-dumping program spanned decades, from 1944 to 1970.

The dumped weapons were deemed to be unneeded surplus. They were hazardous to transport, expensive to store, too dangerous to bury and difficult to destroy.

In the early 1970s, the Army publicly admitted it dumped some chemical weapons off the U.S. coast. Congress banned the practice in 1972. Three years later, the United States signed an international treaty prohibiting ocean disposal of chemical weapons.

Only now have Army reports come to light that show how much was dumped, what kind of chemical weapons they were, when they were thrown overboard and rough nautical coordinates of where some are.

The reports contain bits and pieces of information on the Army's long-running dumping program. The reports were released to the Daily Press - which cross-indexed them to obtain the most comprehensive, detailed picture yet of what was dumped, where and when.

To put the information in context, the newspaper also examined nautical charts, National Archive records, scientific studies and interviewed dozens of experts on unexploded ordnance and chemical warfare in the United States and overseas.

The Army's Brankowitz created the seminal report on ocean dumping. He examined classified Army records and in 1987 wrote a long report on chemical weapons movements over the decades. It included the revelation that more than a dozen shipments ended up in the ocean. The report wasn't widely disseminated.

His follow-up report in 1989 uncovered - through review of other previously classified documents - the rough nautical coordinates of some dumpsites and the existence of more dump zones. In 2001, a computer database was created to include additional dump zones that the Army found and more details on some of the dumping operations.

The database summary and the 1989 report had never been released publicly before.

"I know I didn't find everything," said Brankowitz, who's worked for more than 30 years on chemical weapons issues for the Army. "I'm very much convinced there are records at the National Archives that have been misfiled. Short of a major research effort that would cost a lot of money, we've done the best we can."

The reports reveal that the Army created at least 26 chemical weapons dumpsites off the coast of at least 11 states - but knows the rough nautical coordinates of only half.

At least 64 million pounds of liquid mustard gas and nerve agent in 1-ton steel canisters were dumped into the sea, along with a minimum of 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, grenades, landmines and rockets - as well as radioactive waste, the reports indicate....

A new fllight tracking site to add to my travel/business page

FlightAware - Free IFR Flight Tracker: Status, Tracking, History, Graphs, and Maps

I'll add it to my biz travel page.

Jimmy Carter has lost his flock -- can he call them back?

Jimmy Carter woke up one day and realized that his culture, his community, had left him overnight. The evangelical deeply religious southern baptist community he knew and loved had turned to the dark path of patriarchal fundamentalism, to hatred and to war.

Since he's Jimmy Carter, he's written a book to call them back home: Amazon.com: Our Endangered Values : America's Moral Crisis: Books.

I skimmed the book in Barnes and Noble. It's not long. Carter establishes his religious credentials early on -- and they're impeccable credentials. He is a serious, dedicated, insightful evangelical who strives to live as a disciple of Christ. I'm a hard case, but I'd fear to withstand Carter's will to save. This man is a rock-ribbed religious traditionalist. He is not, however, a modern fundamentalist. He is their very antithesis.

He's quietly and passionately horrified by the path America has taken, and by the role of religious fundamentalists in that path. He comes across as puzzled but patient, as persistent in his efforts to retrieve his brethren as he was saving souls in Lock Haven Pennsylvania. (My wife and I did ER shifts there during our family practice residency, so I actually know of the place! In 1987 it was a town that had been frozen in time around 1950 or so.)

If I were the praying sort, I'd be praying for his success.

Obsidian Wings: next steps in the war on terror

Secret torture camps in Poland. Hmm. Where was Treblinka? You'd think the Poles would remember their past better. Running camps for foreign forces is a shady business.

Obsidian Wings makes some reasonable extrapolatons from the practices of the Bush adminnistration.

Amazon: buy a chapter, then buy the book

Amazon is showing some life! GMSV reports one can now buy a chapter of an Amazon book, then upgrade to the book. A good way to try out new authors.

Return the past - Amazon engages human computers

This small announcement is a historic event.

Prior to the 1940s a 'computer' was a human being who did computational tasks by hand. A large task might be distributed to hundreds of clearks, often women. These human computers did calculations and broke encryptions.

Then came the electronic computer. But there are some tasks our computers don't do well (yet). Image processing, for example. Speech recognition. Natural language processing. Managing calendars. responding to messages. Lots of stuff. Now Amazon has launched a program to restore the human computer: Amazon Mechanical Turk. The payments may not be large, but there are millions of people around the world that could do those tasks. If Amazon hooks up human computational needs to human 'computers' in Africa (via cell phone browsers) they will have initiated a world-changing event.

This little announcement may be the biggest news of the year. I've been waiting for this to happen for a few years, but I haven't commented on it since I've some business ideas in this domain.

DirectDeals.com: obsolete windows software

I'm not fond of most software upgrades, so a web site that sells outdated products is fine with me:

DirectDeals.com - Pc Software, Discount Software, Computer Software, Anti Virus Software, Computer Hardware

Click on the 'clearance' tab for the old and cheap packages.

Stop the megapixel madness

This is really nuts. The MHz madness in PCs caused some harm (diversion of design into meaningless numbers), but the megapixel madness in digital cameras is producing lousy pictures and driving out good cameras.

Sharp 10 megapixel 1/1.7" CCD: Digital Photography Review

As if noise and detail levels weren't bad enough from the latest batch of digital cameras based around the 8 megapixel Sharp CCD they've today announced one that crams even more pixels into tiny package. The RJ21W3BA0ET is a ten megapixel 1/1.7" CCD with 3766 horizontal and 2801 vertical pixels (total) and a pixel pitch of just 2.05 µm. We always kind of hope that the next compact sensor announcement will have some real innovation like higher sensitivity and lower noise but it appears as though market forces just want 'more megapixels'.

Friends shouldn't let friends buy these 10 mpixel monstrosities. Educate and warn! Six megapixels is probably as far as we can go with CCD technology on these small sensors. Which brings me to the new 6 mpixel image stabilized SONY ultra-compact. If I wasn't boycotting SONY due to their malignant incompetence, I'd be sorely tempted by this one.

Beyond madness: big media and big politics

I ranted a bit ago about the "BrainLock" technology of 2040 that will shut the final loopholes in digital rights management. I figured it was a good wild-eyed rant.

But then, a day later, another story makes my scenario seem all to likely:

EFF: DeepLinks

[if the proposed legislation passes ...] Every consumer analog video input device manufactured in the United States will be, within a year, forced to obey not one, but two new copy restriction technologies: a watermarking system called VEIL, and a rights system called CGMS-A (we've covered CGMS-A before; we'll talk a bit more about VEIL soon).

And what might these MPAA-specified, government-mandated technologies do?

They prescribe how many times (if at all) the analog video signal might be copied - and enforce it. This is the future world that was accidentally triggered for TiVo users a few months ago, when viewers found themselves lectured by their own PVR that their recorded programs would be deleted after a few days.

But it won't just be your TiVo: anything that brings analog video into the digital world will be shackled. Forget about buying a VCR with an un-DRMed digital output. Forget about getting a TV card for your computer that will willingly spit out an open, clear format.

Forget, realistically, that your computer will ever be under your control again. To allow any high-res digitization to take place at all, a new graveyard of digital content will have to built within your PC.

Freshly minted digital video from authorised video analog-to-digital converters will be marshalled here and here only, where they will be forced to comply with the battery of restrictions dictated by Hollywood.

In this Nightmare Before Turing, video content will be crippled, far more than it ever was in its old analog home. They will only be able to be recorded using "Authorized Recording Methods", or "Bound Recording Methods", and the entire subsystem will have to obey "robustness" requirements that will make circumvention for fair use - and open source development in general - near impossible.

The unprotected analog outputs of computers will be, in perpetuity, restricted to either DRM-laden standards, or to a "constrained image", "no more than 350,000 pixels". Analog video which has been branded as "do not copy", will last for only ninety minutes only in the digital world - and will be erased, literally frame by frame, megabyte by megabyte, from your PC, without your control. You'll watch a two hour film, and as you watch the final half hour, the first few scenes will be being dissolved away by statute.

Moore's Law won't dictate how technology might improve and innovate any longer: in this Halloween future, the new limit for technological innovation is No More's Law, where your specs are spelled out and frozen by Congress in a law drafted by standards that were laughable in the last century.

There's more. If we had an average government this wouldn't happen, but we're afflicted with what may be one of the worst governments (executive and legislative) in the history of the Republic. This government allows this sort of thing to happen and to become law.

The bright side? The American public appears to be in a deep coma. It's electroshock therapy like this bill that might wake them up and bring in a reform government. So, Bush et al, "bring it on". Pass more laws like this. Lots more. Americans need some serious voltage applied ...

It's good news for books though.

David Brin on the failure of SETI

David read my Fermi Paradox page and noted I'd omitted a 1983 article of his. I need to add it in, but for the moment here's his reference and commentary.

David is not a fan to active SETI, though the Fermi Paradox is a bit reassuring on that count. It probably won't work, but at worst it might finish us off.

Contrary Brin: (pause) Extinction ... and avoiding it...

...John, my 1983 paper is: Quarterly Journal of Royal Astronomical Society, fall1983, v.24, pp283-309 Also see: Am.J.Physics Jan89 -Resource Letter on Extraterrestrial Civilization. (Downloadable at http://www.davidbrin.com/sciencearticles.html or http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1983QJRAS..24..283B (let me know if you have troubles.)

The unique feature is that it remains the ONLY scientific paper about SETI that attempts to review all ideas, instead of using zero evidence to support a single adamant theory. In 22 years, there has still not been any paper as comprehensive. I was supposed to write a book, but who has time?

The irony... the SETI crowd has become among the most cult-like and narrowminded group anywhere. Their ideology has radicalized and dogmatized to such an extent that they will drive out anyone who does not pledge faith to things like "all advanced alien races are automatically altruistic." Ooops, sorry. Using the word "alien" will also get you ejected. Along with any mention of the ten thousand sci fi gedankenexperiments about first contact.

They are now supporting "active seti"... or poking at the experiment by blaring YOOHOO! at the cosmos with radio telescopes, an utter betrayal of the pledge to passively sift the sky and listen "for as long as it takes." Needless to say, anybody outside of the cult finds this arrogant presumption appalling. But they are invulnerable to reason. If you ask for discussions before yelling into an unknown cosmic jungle, you are "paranoid".

The ability of human beings to romanticize, and turn modernist ideals into romanticism, is legendary. Marxists turned a future-oriented notion into a reactionary killing machine. The 1930s "modernist" architects became tyranical magicians, as soon as they could. What we are trying to do is very very hard and contrary to human urges. SETI is the latest sad exapmple of the fact that even scientists will avoid Citokate, unless they are either very wise... or prevented from doing so.

Our struggle is uphill...

George Bush; Deity of the Computer Simulation?

David Brin has a rather disturbing essay asserting that George W Bush is best understood as the hero of a computer simulation in which we are all (presumably) bit actors: Contrary Brin: The Holodeck Scenario: Part II.

It is kind of creepy. How can someone so incompetent win so many times? Maybe God has a really weird sense of humor. Or maybe Bush is God ...