Back to Iraq 3.0: Zarqawi Analysis

The best analysis I've seen thus far on Zarqawi's death is from from Back to Iraq 3.0. Chris has been pessimistic about the future for Iraq, but he is cautiously optimistic today.

It's not just, or even primarily, the death of an evil man. It's the 17 raids that occurred at the same time. It's the appointment of a Sunni minister and a non-militia Shiite minister. It's the way he was apparently killed, as part of a bigger painstaking process of isolating him and boxing him in. It's the suggestion that Zarqawi was betrayed by Sunnis that had come to hate him, and were ready to strike a deal. It's the belief that many Sunnis wanted to deal, but were afraid of Zarqawi's vengeance.

I've read a claim by historians that there's a time in many conflicts when the parties have worked through their initial enthusiasm for murder, and are ready to reconsider their goals. I remember when this happened in Lebanon, after a long civil war.

On another front, it is said that both bin Laden and Zawahiri had likely come to hate Zarqawi and that they will celebrate his death. Perhaps true, but the hunt for Zarqawi took up a lot of scarce military and intelligence resources. Now they will be redeployed.

Medical cyanoacrylate use: why is the best summary on Dan's Data?

I stopped seeing patients about 7 years ago, but towards the end of my clinical career I started using cyanoacrylate to close wounds. What I find odd about this useful description of cyanoacrylate use is that it appeared not in a medical journal, but in an eclectic Australian blog written by a non-clinical geek polymath. What does that say about 21st century expertise and knowledge communication?

Dan's Data letters #152 - page 3

... I've used plain superglue occasionally as a wound closer, though; never for anything very dramatic, but it does indeed do the job quickly and neatly for small cuts. Many model-makers have dealt in this way with X-Acto knife cuts without leaving their workbench.

If you've got a more sizeable injury, hardware store superglue can still work well, but only if you know what you're doing, which you very probably don't if hardware store superglue is what you're using. The idea is to stitch the edges of the wound together with the glue, not just squirt it in there. Glue in the wound will only make things worse, not least because cyanoacrylate sets fast when it's wet (when used for ordinary applications, it sets because of contact with water vapour in the air; this is also why it bonds to skin so well), and gets hot when it sets fast...

Incidentally, not a lot of people know about the water-sets-superglue thing. If you need superglue to set fast, you can spritz it with a little water from a spray bottle. In a pinch, you can just spit on it, but that won't give you a good quality joint.

The water spritz won't work as nicely as regular "superglue accelerator", available from hobby shops, but it doesn't smell weird either, and it gives you more time to locate the parts - accelerator works so fast that the standard way of using it is to put the glue on one part and the accelerator on the other, then bring them together.

Entertainment can also be gained from an excessive quantity of water-thin superglue (also from hobby shops, who have far more cyanoacrylate products than you'll find at the hardware store) and a similarly excessive quantity of accelerator, in a disposable vessel like a spraycan lid. The reaction is quite enthusiastically exothermic; do it in a well-ventilated place, and not on your nice carpet.

Paradoxically, cyanoacrylate is also slightly water soluble, which is another reason why it's good for wound closing; the moistness of the skin will slowly encourage the glue to flake off (as it will if you get glue on your fingers while working on something; time is the only safe way to remove superglue, though shaving it off with a safety razor can be diverting, and leave you with no fingerprints). The glue will dissolve faster when the water's warmer, which is why model car people who want to get superglued tyres off of wheels do it by boiling the wheels.

See, now you know how to remove your fingerprints too. Handy next time you want to break into NSA headquarters and revise your identity records.

Lost artifacts: Hyphenation and typing

Gomers like me often comment about how our children are puzzled by bits of old technology, like rotary phones, typewriters, record players, and moon walks. How many, however, have noticed the disappearance of the typographic hyphen?

Even the Wikipedia article on hyphenation partly misses the mark (the author is doubtless too young to make the connection to the typewriter):

Hyphen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

...When flowing text, it is sometimes preferable to break a word in half so that it continues on another line rather than moving the entire word to the next line. Since it is difficult for a computer program to automatically make good decisions on when to hyphenate a word the concept of a soft hyphen was introduced to allow manual specification of a place where a hyphenated break was allowed without forcing a line break in an inconvenient place if the text was later reflowed. Soft hyphens are most useful when the width is known but future editability is desired, as few would have the patience to put them in at every place they believed a hyphenated split was acceptable (as would be needed for their meaningful use on a medium like the Web).

In the days of typewriting, hyphenation was frequently done to give text a smoother appearance. Nowadays we either live with the ragged right margin or expect the wordprocessor to adjust spacing to give a smoother right margin. When writing for media that reflow text there's no way to manually insert a typographic hyphen, and I'm not aware of web authoring software that inserts tokens for soft typhens (I don't know how many browsers would support them anyway, and the impact on rendering speed would be annoying).

I think the typographic hyphen has passed into history -- unmourned. Really, there ought to have been a service.

Copyright madness: don't take photos that are TOO good.

Don't take pictures that are too good. You may not be able to print them. On a related front, campaign donors have once again snuck a clause into some congressional business that would make it illegal to put one's personal CD collection onto an iPod.

This is all good. I take the millenialist approach here -- the worse things get, the more likely the savior will appear. We need the rights holders to really go crazy, and go crazy as quickly as possible, so that the average gal on the street blows her top.

Come on SONY, I know you can help push this over the top ...

The transhumanists - a portrait

The early women's suffrage movement, I recall, had its share of eccentric personalities. A mainstream gentleperson of the late 19th century, despite some sympathy for the movemement, might consider the spokespersons quite cracked.

Replayed today some of the leaders would still seem as odd as most movement leaders, but almost all of their vision has been fully accepted. The future manifests itself from the outside, and its carried by some whacky vectors. (Some would put me in that category, but really I'm quite boring.)

I think of that when reading Saletan's mildly amused but sympatheticessay on the transhumanists. There are some whacky people speaking there. In 1906 they'd have been whacky people advocating a woman's right to control fertility, in 2006 they're whacky people redefining humanity, in 2106 they'd be whacky people advocating .... ok, whacky somethings ... ok, so it'd be a miracle if anything is still communicating then ...

A good essay. I suspect about 80% of what they say will be mainstream one day, assuming there is a stream.

BTW, Who is Saletan? I had the impression somehow that he was a Bush supporter, but now I'm thinking I was confused.

People not like you and I ...

Three alleged humans have solved a five dimensional Rubik's "cube". A solution takes "thousands" of twists. I'd like to see these folks on TV somewhere ...

Relational and feature memory

Researchers of memory now think of it in terms of relational and feature memory.

Sounds good to me. I've long thought I was pretty good at remembering relationships between things, and average at remembering attributes or features of things. Researchers now believe these are handled by different neural subsystems.

Where do you hide a 300 mile crater?

A mile beneath the East Antarctic ice sheet. Theory is that a 30 mile meteor smacked the earth 250 million years ago, splitting Gondwana's plate and causing the Permian-Triassic extinction.

The surprising part is that 30% of land vertebrates survived! Land critters are hard to kill, 90% of sea critters died.

The crater sounds pretty real, its relation to the extinction is said to be more controversial.

Da Vinci Code and the Catholic Digest: Oddly revealing

I find this oddly revealing, and a bit poignant.

I'd noted earlier that one good feature of the Da Vinci code is that it's causing some christians (probably just Catholics really) to examine the history of how their religion developed. In contrast to the often terrible and bloody history of the Catholic church, the history of Catholic thought is somewhat encouraging. So I was curious when I came across a version of that history at my parents house, in a pamphlet written by Catholic Digest. (I'm an agnostic/pantheist/atheist, but my mother is Vactican II Catholic - hence the pamphlet. I also grew up learning at my Quebec Catholic high school that the Children's Crusade was a noble endeavor, so I have a well-earned skepticism of church propaganda.)

The Catholic Digest represents one aspect of the modern Catholic church. I'd guess it's relatively mainstream. The pamphlet is a response to the Da Vinci code.

It's very well done, and it's quite fascinating, even erudite. Where else can one read, in about 3 brief pages, about early Jewish vegetarian Christians (the Ebionites), Marcion who felt that Yahweh was completely unrelated to the God of Jesus (isn't that obvious?), adoptionists who felt Jesus was born human and adopted by God, Docetists who claimed Jesus was faking suffering, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Letter of Barnabas, and Athansias of Alexander? And, of course, those Gnostics.

Pretty good stuff.

So the weird part? You have to order the pamphlet or pick it up at your local Catholic Church. In a few minutes of looking I couldn't find a web version on the Catholic Digest website. I'd naively thought it would be a big link on page one, or at least a link from where they sell the pamphlet.

My best guess is that they want the money for the pamphlet, so they didn't put it online. My next guess is that they really don't want it to be read without the intercession of a priest (or, since priests are rare these days, some other intercessor). Ironically, and I say this with sympathy, both attitudes are historically very Catholic.

It's a shame really. I hope they relent and put the text online, with links to additional educational material. On the other hand, they know their flock better than I. Perhaps they fear that could be more dangerous than a bestseller (which I'll probably never read, but which I now have great respect for).

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Robert F Kennedy Jr is not a rigorous thinker. His writings on autism are perfectly awful. So I'd prefer to have read about GOP election fraud from another source:

Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

... The mounting evidence that Republicans employed broad, methodical and illegal tactics in the 2004 election should raise serious alarms among news organizations. But instead of investigating allegations of wrongdoing, the press has simply accepted the result as valid. ''We're in a terrible fix,'' Rep. Conyers told me. ''We've got a media that uses its bullhorn in reverse -- to turn down the volume on this outrage rather than turning it up. That's why our citizens are not up in arms.''

The lone news anchor who seriously questioned the integrity of the 2004 election was Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. I asked him why he stood against the tide. ''I was a sports reporter, so I was used to dealing with numbers,'' he said. ''And the numbers made no sense. Kerry had an insurmountable lead in the exit polls on Election Night -- and then everything flipped.'' Olbermann believes that his journalistic colleagues fell down on the job. ''I was stunned by the lack of interest by investigative reporters,'' he said. ''The Republicans shut down Warren County, allegedly for national security purposes -- and no one covered it. Shouldn't someone have sent a camera and a few reporters out there?'

My guess is that the GOP had established a strong "ends justify the means" culture, and that their people took whatever measures were necessary. I'm not sure it required all that much coordination, all it took was a culture of victory at all costs. Was there fraud? It would be odd if there weren't - this is America after all. Was ther enough fraud to throw the election to Bush? Maybe, but I'll reserve judgment pending a more reliable source. Was it coordinated fraud? No clue.

Some of the most interesting evidence, by the way, comes from statistical analysis. The probability that all the exit polls would have erred to Kerry rather than Bush is said to be absurdly low (60,000 to 1)...

Hyper-G: the road not taken

Charles Stross blew me away when he casually linked to BYTE's 1996 Hyper-G article. Hyper-G was Gopher's answer to the web ...

...Information Landscape offers an interactive, 3-D representation of the database structure. Users can 'fly' over the information hierarchy, represented as a virtual landscape.

... The color and height of specific landmarks, for example, represent document type and size. Two-dimensional maps are also standard. Any changes made to documents and databases are immediately reflected in both representations.

... Documents have attributes ... -- for example, author, keywords, and creation date -- that can be used in searches.

-- An underlying object-oriented database ensures data consistency and integrity.

You can appreciate some of Hyper-G's features only if you use a generic Hyper-G browser. Currently, two are available: Amadeus for Microsoft Windows and Harmony for the X Window system ... A client application for the Macintosh will be available soon. Generic clients are not really meant to compete with Web clients; besides the advanced navigation features, the main reason for using a generic client is authoring capability, so you can modify documents.

Ahh. Yes. The road not taken. No broken links (that's the database), real metadata (semantic web - 10 years ago), information visualization, built-in authoring ...

Oh well, it wouldn't have scaled. The web worked because it was crappy enough to scale (loosely coupled) and wonderful enough to be useful. Still, points to Stross for remembering the glories of the mid-90s. Now THAT was an era of innovation.

I was also surprised to learn that BYTE is still around in some form and that the 1994-1998 print archives are online. BYTE at its best was impossibly good, at its worst it was better than anything we have today. When we lost BYTE we lost 10 points off the world's collective tech IQ. Turns out Pournelle is still there, and still trying to get his computers to work. Don't confuse the web site, no matter how noble, with the print version. Do, however, read some of the 1995 to 1996 print archives. Those were the glory days ...

Charles Stross on the future of the identity card

Charles Stross writes science fiction. He's terribly bright. He's written a short essay on how identity cards, like our REAL ID, will work (not) in about 10 years. Some of it is more plausible than others (I think American's won't resist as much as his characters do), but it's persuasive.

I need to add him to my reading list and bloglines list.

DeLong on how to be a treasury secretary

Brad DeLong, a Clinton insider, has written a fascinating essay on how to be a Rubinesque treasury secretary. Whether or not the method would work, it's a unique introduction to high power politics.

New Orleans will not be entirely rebuilt

It's looked for a while as though there was reluctance to rebuild on the lower parts of New Orleans. This may end the debate:

New Orleans sinking faster than expected:

... The research, being published Thursday in the journal Nature, is based on new satellite radar data for the three years before Katrina struck in 2005. The data show that some areas are sinking - from overdevelopment, drainage and natural seismic shifts - four or five times faster than the rest of the city. And that, experts say, can be deadly.

'My concern is the very low-lying areas,' said lead author Tim Dixon, a University of Miami geophysicist. 'I think those areas are death traps. I don't think those areas should be rebuilt.'

For years, scientists figured New Orleans on average was sinking about one-fifth of an inch a year based on 100 measurements of the region, Dixon said. The new data from 150,000 measurements taken from space finds that about 10 percent to 20 percent of the region had yearly subsidence in the inch-a-year range, he said...

Molly Ivins: Enron's President Bush

Molly Ivins makes the populist case. It's a strong case these days. I liked the summary of the campaing contributions Enron and its execs made. Note the sum of the executive contributions (bolded by me):

WorkingForChange-The takeover is complete

...The extent to which not just state legislatures but the Congress of the United States are now run by large corporate special interests is beyond mere recognition as fact. The takeover is complete. Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay put in place a system in which it's not a question of letting the head of the camel into the tent -- the camels run the place.

It has all happened quite quickly -- in less than 20 years. Laws were changed and regulations repealed until an Enron can set sail without responsibility, supervision or accountability. The business pages are fond of trumpeting the merits of 'transparency' and 'accountability,' but you will notice whenever there is a chance to roll back any of New Deal regs, the corporations go for broke trying to get rid of them entirely.

I'm not attempting to make this a partisan deal -- only 73 percent of Enron's political donations went to Republicans. But I'll be damned if Enron's No. 1 show pony politician, George W. Bush, should be allowed to walk away from this. Ken Lay gave $139,500 to Bush over the years. He chipped in $100,000 to the Bush Cheney Inaugural Fund in 2000 and $10K to the Bush-Cheney Recount Fund.

Plus, Enron's PAC gave Bush $113,800 for his '94 and '98 political races and another $312,500 from its executives. Bush got 14 free rides on Enron's corporate jets during the 2000 campaign, including at least two during the recount. Until January 2004, Enron was Bush's top contributor.

And what did it get for its money? Ken Lay was on Bush's short list to be energy secretary. He not only almost certainly served on Cheney's energy task force, there is every indication that the task force's energy plan, the one we have been on for five years, is in fact the Enron plan. Lay used Bush as an errand boy, calling the governor of Texas and having him phone Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania to vouch for what swell energy deregulation bills Enron was sponsoring in states all over the country...

I like my campaign reform proposals better than Molly's generic appeal to public financing.