Mars - ice, ice everywhere

If historians look back at our time, they will be puzzled by many things. One of the oddest puzzles will be the curious lack of interest in the stunning discoveries being made on Mars.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Radar sees ice deep below Mars:

Mars Express has become the first spacecraft to detect reserves of water ice beneath the surface of the Red Planet, experts have announced.

The Marsis radar experiment carried onboard appears to have discovered water ice 2km into the subsurface.

It is thought the greatest reservoir of retained water on Mars could be found beneath the surface, perhaps providing a habitat for microbial life.

... Underground layered deposits at the planet's north pole have an upper unit thought to be dominated by water ice. This water ice is believed to be nearly pure, with only about 2% contamination by dust.

Beneath this ice layer is a lower unit containing sand cemented with water ice...

... Chryse Planitia is thought to have been shaped by the outflow of floodwaters from the Valles Marineris region and other areas of the northern highlands.

The radar should be able to detect liquid water if it exists in that form beneath the Martian surface.

'We have found no convincing evidence of liquid water yet,' said Jeff Plaut, Marsis principal investigator at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The science team will begin using the radar experiment to search for liquid water in late December.

Emphases mine. I suppose Europe was the same way when the first reports came in of mysterious lands across the ocean. There was a lot going on and the ocean seemed very wide. It was hard to imagine what the future impact of the news would be.

I note the word "convincing". I wonder what Plaut meant. Late December is not far away ...

Ice or not, Mars has water. Lots and lots of water. If anything like us is around in a hundred years, it will live there.

Fundamentalism fun: open barrel, insert fish

If we weren't ruled by incompetent fundamentalists I'd resist the temptation to link this Skeptico post.

Skeptico: Putting the fun in fundamentalism

... My favorite has to be ... November’s post of the month:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

A powerful argument. Still, I’m confident that sooner or later scientists, working diligently, will locate and identify this external source of energy that provides light and heat to planet Earth. Quite a day that will be.

The site Skeptico refers to is: Fundies say the Darndest Things!. Caveat: the posting quoted here seems a bit too perfect. I wonder about a setup ... Not everyone posting on an fundamentalist web site is necessarily sincere. It might be hard for college kids to resist the temptation to see how far they could push the envelope and not get caught.

GOP will win on Roe. If they want to ...

BBC NEWS | Americas | US abortion rights in the balance?

Update 12/4/05: This was an accidental post, I'd meant to put it in as a draft and edit it later. Nonetheless, it (oddly enough) received a comment, which was quite well written. I recommend clicking the comment link and reading Pidgas' post.

I thought the BBC news article was pretty well done, though the title is misleading -- as Pidgas suggests. It's Roe vs. Wade that may fall in the next year or so. As I've noted elsewhere the growth of genetic testing, and the desire of American parents for genetically optimal children, will enure continued use of abortion across all economic, cultural, and religious groups.

The more interesting question is whether the GOP really wants to defeat Roe vs. Wade. I rather suspect they'd hate to win that fight. It wouldn't end abortion, but it would cause them a great deal of political misery as the abortion fight moved into the legislature (where it does belong).

On the other hand, I suspect the Dems have finally recognized that Roe is a fight they can't win. It's an albatross for the Dems and funding stream for the GOP; the best strategy is to sit back and watch the GOP go into panic mode as victory becomes inevitable.

Earth belongs to the bugs

To a first approximation earth is the world of the archaebacteria. To a second approximation it is the world of the bugs:

A Pair of Wings Took Evolving Insects on a Nonstop Flight to Domination - New York Times - Carl Zimmer

A little over 400 million years ago, their six-legged ancestors came out of the water onto dry land. They have evolved into an estimated five million living species - dwarfing the diversity of all other animals combined. Even if you throw in all the known species of plants, fungi and protozoans, insects still win.

Insects are also a success in terms of sheer biomass. Put all of the insects on a giant scale, and they will outweigh all other animals, whales and elephants included.

And insects are also ecologically essential. If all humans decided to leave for Mars, taking all the vertebrates with them, the disruption to life on Earth would be incomparably less than the catastrophe that would ensue if insects disappeared. Forests would probably collapse, rivers and oceans would be poisoned, and many other animals would starve...

Carl Zimmer's blog is fantastic, btw.

Google, privacy, and outsourcing Total Information Awareness

The NYT has an OpEd on Google's privacy policies. There are no surprises there; one should always assume anything done online is public knowledge. Only the very sophisticated have any privacy now, and even they may be tracked by textual analysis software that can match text to identity based on idiosyncracies of expression (and, presumably, of thought -- giving new meaning to the concept of "thought police").

In general, privacy is very 20th century. I tried to fight this, but eventually I realized this was a losing battle -- especially after 9/11. Humans lived most of our existence in small communities with very little privacy; that is the world we've returned to.

There was one slightly interesting point raised in the article, though in reality it has little to do with Google:

What Google Should Roll Out Next: A Privacy Upgrade - New York Times

The government can gain access to Google's data storehouse simply by presenting a valid warrant or subpoena. Under the Patriot Act, Google may not be able to tell users when it hands over their searches or e-mail messages. If the federal government announced plans to directly collect the sort of data Google does, there would be an uproar - in fact there was in 2003, when the Pentagon announced its Total Information Awareness program, which was quickly shut down.

This is not new, in fact even I've written about this over the past few years. The Feds discovered during the 90s that the best way to deal with inconvenient legislation was to route around it by outsourcing key functions; the FBI in particular outsourced many of their information gathering functions in the 90s. More recently, of course, our wonderous government has routed around inconvenient prohibitions by outsourcing torture. In the same manner Poindexter's "Total Information Awareness" didn't "disappear" (silly idea), it merely changed names and was outsourced.

Google isn't an outsourcing tool for the TIA project, but it the Patriot Act has made Google and other online services unwitting accomplices.

Will Americans' ever catch on? Not if the media continues to completely miss the real story. I'm saddened and amused to read of privacy legislation that targets government rather than corporations. Really, it's a total waste of paper.

If Americans did catch on, what could be done? We can't stop TIA now, privacy really is history. We could, however, make the corporations implementing TIA and other programs legally liable for errors. If we don't learn lessons of the utterly incompetent 'do not fly' list program, thousands of Americans will be injured by these outsourced program. We will then be living in Gilliam's Brazil.

The singularity and why you should be very nice to your children

Like most geeks, I have a bit of an interest in 'The Singularity' (insert appropriate theme music). I don't buy Kurzweil's thesis that we boomers will all be uploaded (Eternity plagued by the boomers? Lord help us all); but I can just barely imagine that today's children might live a lot longer than I will. So it was interesting to read this interview with Siggi, a German gentleman of roughly my age:

The World According to Siggi

Talking about immortality, do you think the information tracks we’re leaving online will be resulting in an infinite life of sorts? Or is this accelerating our decay and we’d fare better engraving our thoughts into stone?

Assuming the storage media won’t be failing on us, we’ll have many tracks be around for a long, long time. One day this will make it possible to reconstruct a person up to a certain point. Considering that you can only hope for many of the teen bloggers to never stop blogging. Paradoxically enough that’s the opposite of what you feel when you’re reading them.

I commented recently on Brin's blog that I thought a similar theme could be turned into a neat short science fiction story. Who would want to digitally resurrect a deceased boomer? Well, the boomer's children might be so motivated. So if you want your digital doppelganger to bear any resemblance to yourself, be sure to leave lots of artifacts .... :-).

Also, be nice to your children. To paraphrase an old Pat Benatar song: "Hell is for the parents of vengeful post-singular children". Ok, so that needs work.

PS. I think it's a part of Mormon theology that when one is 'saved', one can retroactively 'save' all of one's ancestors. Maybe that could be worked into the story ...

Freedom, China and a suggestion for young American -- volunteer editors

Kaikaisagirl of Harbin, China was reading Gordon's Notes (she'd searched blogs for English language comments on Harbim). She added a comment to my posting on the Harbin benzene spill. We've corresponded via the blog comments and recently she updated her blogger profile: Kaikaisagirl (she is). Her recent comments provide an interesting perspective on the 'new old world', China reborn (I edited lightly):

It's totally safe to post whatever I like in English on a foreign website ... I don't have the habit of writing a blog, especially an English blog. I have to try very hard to write an article readable to native speakers on an English blog site, every time I finish an English article, I find it flat and void :(

I'm raised in China; it's hard for any Chinese to have an excess interests in politics. A lot of people, like me, do care about what's going on domestically and internationally, but to be safe you can't become an activist in China...

... Harbin is not as bad as it sounds in the news, maybe it's because I live on campus. People have so many inconveniences without tap water. Although it will resume this evening, most of us still are skeptical of the water quality since benzene is difficult to get rid of -- and we don't trust the government.

I hope Kaikaisagirl is right that she can post these things in an English language blog. Reading between the lines it seems that one can be a bit of an activist in English outside of China.

Once upon a time (1982), in another life, I was peripherally associated with long forgotten minor Montreal based Chinese dissident movement called "China Spring". I have a vague sense, from then and now, that the Chinese government distinguishes between activism among intellectuals and activism that involves the masses. The former is sometimes permitted, but the latter is dangerous.

China is an exciting nation. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the challenges we and China face, particularly when America is led by incompetents. Still, words from Harbin cannot help but be encouraging. There is hope.

I hope Kaikaigirl does continue to post to her english blog. I've added it to my feeds. It's very hard to post in a foreign language; I wonder if there's a role in these types of international blogs for 'local language editors'; native speakers who could lessen the burden of english grammatical and stylistic quirks. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this evolve. It would be a real contribution that smart American high school students could provide, and it wouldn't look bad on a college application either.

Olaf Stapledon - forgotten visionary

Metafilter has an excellent note on "Olaf Stapledon: The Star Maker". The links are well worth visiting. Stapledon was a WW I veteran, and a contemporary of CS Lewis and Tolkien. All of them spent much of their lives reacting to the hell of 'the great war'.

Schneier on Security: Want to steal the identity of a Janus Mutual Fund holder?

If I held any Janus mutual fund shares I'd be writing them an letter ...

Schneier on Security: Vote Someone Else's Shares

If you have a valid proxy number, you can add 1300 to the number to get another valid proxy number. Once entered, you get another person's name, address, and account number at Janus! You could then vote their shares too.

This amount of information suffices for much identity theft. Schneier (and I) am right to spread the news. In the absence of any governmental action, we need to expose the staggering failures of these companies to implement even trivial security measures. I am sure Janus isn't the only mutual fund to make this mistake.

Perhaps the pasting they are now receiving will cause others to change their operating procedures.

The "better bicycle" approach to avoiding identity theft

The best way to prevent bicycle theft, is the "better lock"/"better bicycle" approach. No bike lock is invincible, so put your bike next to a better bike with an inferior lock (dings in the paint helps with being a less better bike btw, bike thieves are usually idiots). This is the same idea as how to outrun a bear -- just be faster than the guy next to you.

To that end, Hoofnagle (link via Schneier, god of security) has listed various measures one can take to make identity theft harder: EPIC West: Electronic Privacy Information Center West Coast Office: Hoofnagle's Consumer Privacy Top 10.

Implement these and the thieves will take your neighbors identity instead. This would be wonderful if your neighbor was, say, a US senator. (Note to Senators: Schneier says we need to make identity theft very expensive for banks -- then it will end. I believe that too.)

I'm impressed with the list. Most of them were new to me, and most are easy to apply. Recommended!

American corruption: Is Abramoff a tipping point?

American governance was very corrupt towards the end of the 19th century; during the so-called Gilded Age. Taft is one of the few presidents that may have been worse than George Bush. (I think Jackson was also worse, so GWB is only #3 -- he did pass Nixon though.) Things turned around fairly dramatically under Teddy Rosevelt and the trust busters. But these things go in cycles ...

We've been in a bad spot since Reagan; Carter was the last genuinely honest President. (Clinton was infinitely better than Bush, but no bastion of integrity). I used to support the Concord coalition, but about 15 years ago it became apparent that we weren't going to be able to deal with our budget issues honestly until we dealt with the growing corruption in American politics. Tim Penny, a former Minnesota Representative, has spoken well on this topic, as has, of course, John McCain and Russ Feingold. Mostly, however, both Democrats and Republicans have been silent. Corruption is now the only bipartisan consensus.

But ... what about the Abramoff Affair?. If the Plame Affair is really about Cheney and the corruption of power, the Abramoff affair is about plain old bribery and corruption. Nothing new, only more brutal and direct than we're accustomed too. Mysteriously, for some unfathomable reason, Abramoff seems to have crossed some sort of line (emphases mine):

Lawmakers Under Scrutiny in Probe of Lobbyist (Washington Post)

The Justice Department's wide-ranging investigation of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff has entered a highly active phase as prosecutors are beginning to move on evidence pointing to possible corruption in Congress and executive branch agencies, lawyers involved in the case said.

Prosecutors have already told one lawmaker, Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), and his former chief of staff that they are preparing a possible bribery case against them, according to two sources knowledgeable about the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The 35 to 40 investigators and prosecutors on the Abramoff case are focused on at least half a dozen members of Congress, lawyers and others close to the probe said. The investigators are looking at payments made by Abramoff and his colleagues to the wives of some lawmakers and at actions taken by senior Capitol Hill aides, some of whom went to work for Abramoff at the law firm Greenberg Traurig LLP, lawyers and others familiar with the probe said.

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R), now facing separate campaign finance charges in his home state of Texas, is one of the members under scrutiny, the sources said. Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.) and other members of Congress involved with Indian affairs, one of Abramoff's key areas of interest, are also said to be among them.

Prosecutions and plea deals have become more likely, the lawyers said, now that Abramoff's former partner -- public relations executive Michael Scanlon -- has agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and to testify about gifts that he and his K Street colleagues showered on lawmakers, allegedly in exchange for official favors.

... Investigators are also gathering information about Abramoff's hiring of several congressional wives, sources said, as well as his referral of clients to Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying and consulting firm run by former senior aides to DeLay. Financial disclosure forms show that the firm employed DeLay's wife, Christine, from 1998 to 2002.

... The former top procurement official in the Bush administration, David H. Safavian, has already been charged with lying and obstruction of justice in connection with the Abramoff investigation. Safavian, who traveled to Scotland with Ney on a golf outing arranged by Abramoff, is accused of concealing from federal investigators that Abramoff was seeking to do business with the General Services Administration at the time of the golf trip. Safavian was then GSA chief of staff.

Does Abramoff represent a tipping point, or will any reform effort prove premature? I'm betting we won't see any real reform succeed under the Bush administration. Put my money on "no tipping point yet". Even if the US does move down the reform road, Italy is a sobering example of how unpredictable reform can be -- they took a huge step forward in the 90s, but then elected Berlusconi -- a man who makes Abramoff seem chaste.

Why the Xbox 360 and the Web 2.0 are awful news for the retail PC industry

Very low end PCs do a quite adequate job with almost all computer applications, save games. Modern games require a monster machine; even children's games require a relatively decent box. So games have been a major driver of non-laptop retail PC purchases -- and, because of their software quality issues, a major source of pain for parents.

Thurott suggests that this trend will soon end. The Xbox 360 is relatively inexpensive, and, for the first time, the gaming experience exceeds that of even a high end Wintel PC. Consumers will keep their old machines, and buy an Xbox. Good news for Microsoft, very bad news for companies that sell into the home market.

In the old days a new version of Windows would drive PC sales. It's clear that Windows Vista will require a honking machine. But why bother? What does Vista promise the home user that Web 2.0 (Google, Yahoo, etc) apps can't deliver better for less money? Sure there's digital photography, home video, etc -- but for all that OS X is a better bet (and a good Intel OS X laptop may be cheaper than a Vista laptop.) In fact the Xbox 360 is good for Apple; by negating the 'games' advantage PC's have had, it really levels the software playing field.

Good comments from Thurott. If the logic holds expect Dell and HP to experience many more bad moments. Apple should weather this well, while Microsft should do just fine. They'll make their rent money from leasing Vista and Office to businesses, and grow with Xbox for home video and gaming.

It is interesting that, with Xbox, Microsoft is becoming more like Apple. They own the hardware platform and the XBox OS ...

Is someone in Harbin China reading this blog?

I posted yesterday on Harbin China, a large city that the New York Times described as a "town". Harbin has lost a large portion of its tap water due to benzene in the nearby river -- an environmental disaster on the Soviet scale. (Arguably Bhopal India still holds the cup.)

My post seemed unremarkable, but it solicited a comment:

kaikaiisagirl said...
I agree with you. Seriously the NYT reporters don't know enough about China. I go to college in Harbin, it is like the 8th or 9th biggest city in China.

It's nice to receive affirmation, but is someone in Harbin really reading Gordon's Notes? "Kaikaiisagirl's" blogger profile tells us s/he joined in August of 2005, but the profile has no other information. I suppose this could be a machine generated post, but I don't see why. On balance, it's most likely someone in Harbin did read that post. Someone who reads and writes English fluently.

How?

Gordon's Notes is a hobby blog. It exists because I'm compelled both to write and to rage against the fall of America. It does not have the practical utility of either Gordon's Tech or Be the Best You Can Be; they have value for me as convenient place to keep my own notes. I have long assumed its readership consists of me, my wife, and, on occasion, a few friends. (My own mother gave up on it a while back.) My limited brushes with fame have been links from Brad DeLong and David Brin. I'm also syndicated in .... medlogs, a project of the ever inventive Dr. Jacob Reider. My guess is that my Harbin readership came via the last.

Fascinating.

Not coincidentally, I read recently the blog reading and writing is increasing exponentially in China (I almost wrote 'exploding in China', but that phrase has become a cliche nowadays). At the moment the authorities are not too aggressive, though raging against the communist party, or discussing life in Harbin, would be substantially riskier than my rants against the Vice-President for Torture.

One curious side-effect of the Chinese blogging scene is that bloggers who read English also translate what they read into Chinese. Years ago Cisco helped the Chinese government erect powerful blocks to forbidden sites; and later to defeat proxy servers that reached those sites. These blocks are perhaps less effective against millions of blogs, each of which excerpts fractions of the forbidden material -- effectively acting as millions of proxy servers.

This is an interesting example of natural selection in action. The role of personal blog as a low profile proxy server is an accident of nature, but blogs that crave readership will adapt to it. They will become more reliable "proxy servers", the better to serve their Chinese readership.

Incidentally, if anyone wants to send me comments on what life has been like in Harbin, I'll post them anonymously here. You can email me at jfaughnan@spamcop.net. I'll also experiment with turning off the 'members only' filter on my Blogger comments, and see how well using the moderation filter alone will work.

Harbin, China - since when is "millions" a town?

The NYT reports on a benzene spill that has contaminated the water for the "town" of Harbin, China -- leaving 3 million without tap water. Only in China could the residence of 8 million people (3 million in the urban core) be called a town. Looking at the Google satellite image it seems to be a very concentrated city, maybe the size of the city of Minneapolis but four times the population.

It sounds like the crisis in Harbin is mercifully easing ... If Minneapolis were to lose its water supply things would not be pretty....

Is war becoming too expensive?

Wars used to consume lots of lives. The civil war, WW I -- incomprehensible volumes of lives. Raw human life, however, is not all that expensive. I shan't belabor the point since it's grossly offensive, but in low tech societies like WW I Europe it didn't cost much to raise a man to die in Verdun.

Wars are getting more expensive though - even for the aggressor. Fighers are educated and their economic output is far, far higher than in WW I. Their lifelong post-war care costs more. As we substitute technology for fighters that costs even more. The medium term costs of the "small" war in Iraq to the US are reaching above 200 billion.. The longer term direct costs for the US alone are now speculated to exceed 1 trillion..

Of course expense is relative. As a percentage of an 6-8 trillion dollar economy perhaps a 1 trillion dollar war is still a "small war". Is war really more expensive for 21st century America compared to 19th century Britain? I certainly hope war is becoming more costly in relative as well as absolute terms, but I don't know.