NASA launches new SETI project: optical search

I of course, predict this effort will fail:

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Telescope bid to spot alien beams

A new optical telescope designed solely to detect light signals from alien civilisations has opened for work at an observatory in Harvard, US.
It will conduct a year-round survey, scanning all of the Milky Way galaxy visible in the Northern Hemisphere...

... Visible light can form tight beams, be incredibly intense, and its high frequencies allow it to carry enormous amounts of information.

Using only present-day terrestrial technology, a bright, tightly focused light beam, such as a laser, can be 10,000 times as bright as its parent star for a brief instant. Such a beam could be easily observed from enormous distances.

'This new search apparatus performs one trillion measurements per second and expands 100,000-fold the sky coverage of our previous optical search,' said the optical telescope's project director, Paul Horowitz of Harvard University, Massachusetts.

On the other hand, I'd imagine that if it's going to work, we'd discover something pretty early. That would make for an interesting summer.

BTW, Greg Bear wrote the short story "Blood Music" in 1982. At the very end he casually resolves the Fermi Paradox using a biological variant of the inescapable singularity solution. That predates my prior "earliest science fiction explanation" by about five years. I need to add that one to my page footnotes!

Rumsfeld out? It's about nuking Iran

Why the new attempt to oust Rumsfeld?

BBC NEWS | Americas | Bush rebuffs attack on Rumsfeld

Six retired generals have spoken out against Mr Rumsfeld's handling of the war in Iraq and apparent disdain for experienced military commanders.

The defence secretary has also personally dismissed suggestions that he should resign.

"Out of thousands and thousands of admirals and generals, if every time two or three people disagreed we changed the secretary of defence of the United States it would be like a merry-go-round," he told Arabic TV channel al-Arabiya.

I'm betting it's about nuking Iran. The prospect of going to war with Iran along with using tactical nuclear weapons, has galvanized the generals. Bad enough to be planning this kind of attack, worse still to do it with an a proven incompetent in command.

The generals can't replace Cheney, so they're focusing on Rumsfeld. As always, it's up to Bush. I can no more predict his thinking than I can predict pulsar signals.

I wonder how many generals secretly wish that old draft-dodging pot-smoking commie was running the country.

Update 4/15/06: Rather to my surprise, the NYT says the same thing. The military is worried abour Rumsfeld leading when Iran is the problem. Emphases mine.

The call by some retired generals for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation is more than an effort to assign blame for the problems that the United States has encountered in Iraq. It also reflects concern that military voices are not being given sufficient weight in the Bush administration's deliberations, as well as unease about the important decisions that lie ahead.

... The retired generals, in effect, have declared Mr. Rumsfeld unfit to lead the nation's military forces as the United States faces crucial decisions on how to extricate itself from Iraq and what to do about Iran's nuclear program.

... On Iran, which has not been addressed directly by the dissenting generals, the United States must decide how forceful a position to take to head off Tehran's suspected nuclear weapons program. Mr. Bush has played down the threat of military action, but — with little progress in resolving the dispute through diplomacy — the option of turning to airstrikes is unlikely to go away. In mapping a strategy for Iran, the United States must balance its apprehension about the emergence of a nuclear-armed Iran against the risk that military strikes against Iranian nuclear installations could lead to a wider war and fan regional unrest...

Lifeboat Britain

Dyer claims Britain keeps its nukes to be ready for invading hordes of global warming refugees. Canada, on the other hand, is indefensible. The US will take it.

Well, not much to do about that one ...

Gwynne Dyer has 12 new articles up

2006 has added 12 articles. I've given up on Dyer adding an RSS feed!

Narus: an ominous name

The Narus 6400 is one of the devices the NSA uses to monitor things like the automatic blogger email that I'll get after I post this : Daily Kos: All About NSA's and AT&T's Big Brother Machine, the Narus 6400.

Wave to the man with the camera son.

Economics of outsourcing

This is so obvious, it's strange Joel on software had to teach me it. On the other hand, he claims someone else pointed it out to him...

The Development Abstraction Layer - Joel on Software

... if only 20% of your staff is programmers, and you can save 50% on salary by outsourcing programmers to India, well, how much of a competitive advantage are you really going to get out of that 10% savings?

Hmm.

Why we can't outsource social services to churches

I'd have thought Trinity Lutheran in Minnesota would be better than this.

Pharyngula: Good thing we're moving to faith-based initiatives, huh?

...Trinity Lutheran Church had a sweet deal with county social services, getting remunerated for caring for disabled seniors, until the county pulled a fast one and tried to trick them into caring for a damned minion of the devil transsexual. They signed her up, showed her around, and then she mentioned that she'd had an operation, and the good reverend had to wield his deep personal knowledge of god's mind to smack her down.

Bottom line: having amateurs doing a professionals job is a very bad idea. Faith based social services is just wrong.

Google Calendar: No Safari, no sync?

Google Calendar does not support Safari.

I don't see a way to sync with iSync -- but maybe someone will build it.Official Google Blog: It's about time

... integrated with Gmail so you can add events mentioned in messages to your calendar with just one click.
.... simple to see calendars from your friends and family, or calendars you find with the built-in calendar search tool, right next to your own calendar. You can choose to share as much or as little of your own calendar, too.
.... You can turn any event on your calendar into an invitation just by adding the email addresses of your guests. They can see and respond to your invitation, whether or not they use Google Calendar themselves.
... Event reminders by email and text message to your mobile phone
... supports the iCal standard
... can add customized Google Calendar event reminder buttons to their pages, letting visitors quickly add copies of events to their calendars.The lack of Safari support is disappointing, but as I recall Gmail started out without it as well.

The Massachusetts miracle: healthcare reform

Most of the times I talk about America's problems with inequity and adapting to globalization, I mention the need to break the connection between employment and healthcare. Health care insurance should have nothing to do with employment status, irregardless of whether the delivery mechanism is single payor governmental care, medical savings accounts, or traditional insurance plans.

I figured this was unlikely to happen in the US barring a populist uprising in the 2008 elections. I knew there were rumbles from Massachusetts, but I didn't pay enough attention to them. My mistake ... (emphases mine):

Massachusetts Legislation on Insurance Becomes Law - New York Times

BOSTON, April 12 — In a ceremony full of pomp and political backpatting, Gov. Mitt Romney signed Massachusetts' landmark health care legislation Wednesday, setting the stage for the state to be the first to provide health coverage to virtually all of its citizens.

... Mr. Romney is considering running for president in 2008, and the success of the bipartisan health care plan could become a major selling point of his candidacy.

... "This isn't 100 percent of what anyone in this room wanted," Mr. Romney said. "But the differences between us are small."

Mr. Kennedy said, "You may well have fired the shot heard round the world on health care in America. I hope so."

The law is projected to provide coverage for about 515,000 of the state's 550,000 uninsured people and leave less than 1 percent of the population uncovered. It goes further than those of any other state.

It requires residents to obtain health insurance by July 1, 2007. People who can afford insurance and do not buy it will be penalized on their state income taxes.

The law takes the $1 billion in the state's free-care pool, which paid for medical care for patients without insurance, and uses it to subsidize insurance for people who cannot afford it. The legislation also makes it possible for more individuals and businesses to buy insurance with pre-tax dollars, saving them money. And it includes a system to encourage insurance companies to provide more affordable plans with fewer benefits or higher deductibles.

... The legislation, months in the making, almost fell apart over disagreements about whether businesses should be charged and how much if they were. Mr. Romney wanted no business fee. Mr. DiMasi wanted a much higher business assessment of 5 percent of a company's payroll,

... Mr. DiMasi, in an interview last week, said: "I see a significant commitment of businesses to contribute in some way to the insurance costs of the uninsured. I see this as a significant principle, whatever the dollar figure is."...

DiMasi, the democrat, is wrong. Romney, the alleged republican, is right. We need to break the relationship between employment and healthcare, not perpetuate it.

Even if McCain hadn' t mutated into an anti-evolution social conservative Bush clone, Romney would now have displaced him as the tolerable Republican candidate. Fortunately for whoever gets the Democratic nomination, there's no way in heck Romney will survive the GOP's nominating process.

ABC News has a relatively technical analysis of Iran's nuclear program

Anthony Cordesman is a well known name in security circles. ABC News, oddly enough, features a technical analylsis he did of Iran's nuclear program.

ABC News: Analysis: Iran's Nuclear Leap Forward

... These are old P-1 centrifuges. It takes thousands operating continuously for a year to have major output and 10,000s to get seriously into the weapons grade production.

It's a weird world when network TV delivers in depth analysis -- in written form. Where it's picked up by Google's news processor and highlighted.

Imagine how that would sound in 1990.

In a world where there's zero trust of the US government, it's handy to have these analyses lying about. I don't necessarily trust Cordesman, but unlike the Bush administration he hasn't proven himself to be utterly untrustworthy.

Generals hate Rumsfeld. What about Bush?

The pressure to dump Rumsfeld grows. We've seen this before, rumor had him gone about a year ago. On the other hand, he sounded very tired and almost human the other day.

The revolt against Donald Rumsfeld. By Fred Kaplan

... It is startling to hear, in private conversations, how widely and deeply the U.S. officer corps despises this secretary of defense. The joke in some Pentagon circles is that if Rumsfeld were meeting with the service chiefs and commanders and a group of terrorists barged into the room and kidnapped him, not a single general would lift a finger to help him...

Rumsfeld stays because Bush wants him. Ultimately it is Bush who is responsible for what Rumsfeld does. The generals aren't dolts, they know that. Makes one wonder if they now despise Bush as well.

That is not a thought a general can express ... Rumsfeld is a handy proxy.

Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution?

Foreign Affairs is the preeminent political science journal. Brad DeLong is pointing his students to an article there:

Foreign Affairs - Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution? - Alan S. Blinder

...Although there are no reliable national data, fragmentary studies indicate that well under a million service-sector jobs in the United States have been lost to offshoring to date. (A million seems impressive, but in the gigantic and rapidly churning U.S. labor market, a million jobs is less than two weeks' worth of normal gross job losses.) However, constant improvements in technology and global communications virtually guarantee that the future will bring much more offshoring of 'impersonal services' -- that is, services that can be delivered electronically over long distances with little or no degradation in quality.

That said, we should not view the coming wave of offshoring as an impending catastrophe. Nor should we try to stop it. The normal gains from trade mean that the world as a whole cannot lose from increases in productivity, and the United States and other industrial countries have not only weathered but also benefited from comparable changes in the past. But in order to do so again, the governments and societies of the developed world must face up to the massive, complex, and multifaceted challenges that offshoring will bring. National data systems, trade policies, educational systems, social welfare programs, and politics all must adapt to new realities. Unfortunately, none of this is happening now.

This theme has emerged in a few places recently. The direct impact of offshoring has been small to date, but the future impacts appear to be inevitably enormous. Even today the indirect impacts have been large -- computer science departments in the US are emptying out. Students are bailing not because of the current job situation, but rather because they correctly evaluate the future job situation. Unfortunately it's not clear what the better options are. Accounting? No. Law? No. Medicine? No. Industrial ontology? Uhh, no. Engineering? Surely you jest. Fast food clerk? No -- it's being outsourced and robotocized. Butler? Ignore the search results, look at the AdWords.

I'd love to read the rest of the article. Alas, it's payware. I'll look for postings that quote more extensively and link to what I find.

PS. It's not true that the world as a whole can't lose. That's only true if you assume continous functions. If the US or Europe convulses in widespread social disruption, then the world as a whole does lose. It's like flying a big jet. You win if you change your flight plans to a better destination, but if the required maneuver is too challenging the wings fall off.

Dan Brown is ravished by Crooked Timber

Crooked Timber doesn't like Dan Brown's 'Angels and Demons'. I'm sure Brown is quivering in his hot tub, but the comments are a lot of fun. I've not read any of this stuff, so I've no other opinion. A fun read. (BTW, Cryptonomicon is a marvelous book, but the first 100 pages are hard going.)

Great DeLong discussion on economic policy

DeLong is discussing economic policy with Greg Mankiw, who chairs Bush's council of economic advisors. Here's how he summarizes Mankiw's response:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: National Saving

... To summarize: Greg wants to: (i) raise taxes, (ii) cut government spending, and so (iii) balance the budget, (iv) shift the tax code to be yet more friendly toward savings, and (v) reform ERISA so that employer-sponsored defined-contribution pension plans are the default option rather than requiring opt-in. I would buy into all four of those, with a footnote about how (iv) needs to be implemented in a way that does not reduce progressivity and make America a yet more unequal place.

In fact Mankiw's response is less direct than this. He leaves open the option of massive cuts in government services such as social security and medicare. DeLong is translating Mankiw's statement into something that's reality based.

The comments are excellent. One comment notes that a consumption tax is a great way to punish those who save, especially those who save in tax deferred accounts. It makes a mockery of the 401K for example. Read the comments.

DeLong wants a progressive tax code, presumably Mankiw doesn't care about that as much ...

Zing!

Wow. Two references to tobacco in two zingers on DeLay, Frist and Boehner. Not bad as vitriol goes.

Political Crackups

... One cannot regret the fall of Tom DeLay, who combined a mastery of politics with a complete indifference to its purpose. Really, what did this man seek public office for? It's said that he was inspired by his conviction that the Environmental Protection Agency is like the Gestapo, but I suspect this theory is too kind. Unlike Newt Gingrich, who bristled with policy ideas, DeLay never seemed to care about anything beyond counting votes and cultivating links to the moneybags on K Street.

Still, in the absence of a functioning administration and a powerful House boss, nobody is running the asylum. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a physician who "diagnosed" Terri Schiavo by watching her on video, is as charismatic as a stethoscope and as principled as a cigarette salesman. I doubt many Americans could even recognize DeLay's successor as House majority leader, John Boehner, let alone say what he stands for. His most memorable moment came in 1995, when he chose the House floor as a suitable venue for distributing checks from tobacco lobbyists.