Zarqawi and the serendipity of fame

Hitler, famously, was a seemingly unremarkable man. It is easy to believe that in another world, he would have worked in a pawn shop. His peculiar talents had a bit of an "autistic-savant" nature -- extraordinary abilties embedded in an average mind.

Zarqawi sounds like that. There's no doubt he had an odd set of talents. Mary Ann Weaver (a western woman wandering in the bad spots of the world) was preparing a bio of Zarqawi, which The Atlantic has rushed to press with his death:

The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

... I learned that the first of al-Zarqawi's two wives had lived in the house until recently. She was his cousin, whom he had married when he was twenty-two. They had four children, two boys and two girls. But not long before my visit, al-Zarqawi had sent an unknown man to drive them across the border to be with him in Iraq. His second wife, a Jordanian-Palestinian whom he had married in Afghanistan, and with whom he has a son, was reported to be with him in Iraq as well. Al-Zarqawi's mother, Omm Sayel, whom he adored, and who had traveled to Peshawar with him when he joined the jihad, died of leukemia in 2004; although he was the most wanted man in Jordan at the time of her death, al-Zarqawi returned to Zarqa in disguise to attend her funeral....

...Everyone I spoke with readily acknowledged that as a teenager al-Zarqawi had been a bully and a thug, a bootlegger and a heavy drinker, and even, allegedly, a pimp in Zarqa’s underworld. He was disruptive, constantly involved in brawls. When he was fifteen (according to his police record, about which I had been briefed in Amman), he participated in a robbery of a relative’s home, during which the relative was killed. Two years later, a year shy of graduation, he had dropped out of school. Then, in 1989, at the age of twenty-three, he traveled to Afghanistan..

...Al-Zarqawi came across to bin Laden as aggressively ambitious, abrasive, and overbearing. His hatred of Shiites also seemed to bin Laden to be potentially divisive—which, of course, it was. (Bin Laden’s mother, to whom he remains close, is a Shiite, from the Alawites of Syria.)...

When pursuing fanatical killers, be sure to stake out the funerals of their mothers. They seem to be uniquely devoted to their mothers, who love them despite some glaring defects. Unconditional love has its disadvantages.

Zarqawi was not a particularly interesting person, but I am quite interested in what creates successful thugs like him. War is a part of the equation, as it was for Hitler. In this sense War is a bit like some awful fungus, that makes spores of veterans that spawn more War. A troubled youth, a capacity for fanatacism, a blindly supportive mother ...

And, yes, the mothers. bin Laden's mother is Shiite. Zarqawi wanted to kill all the Shiites. And we learn this only now? Sometimes I think the greatest conspiracies are not about what is said, but rather about what is not said.

As my wife would say, the mother is always to blame ...

WGA: Windows Global Acquisition

Microsoft owns your PC:

Washington Post - HELP FILE

Q The last round of software updates from Microsoft consisted only of something called "Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications." What is that?

A This program tries to verify that you have paid for Windows XP. It normally does this by putting together a profile of your PC's hardware, then checking a Microsoft database to see if your copy of XP hasn't already been used on a different hardware profile.

But recently, the company began installing Notifications automatically via Windows Update. It doesn't just scan your system once; it repeats the test every 90 days. If it cannot validate your copy of XP, it will nag you to buy a license.

Notifications also looks for new instructions from Microsoft every day. The company says these daily checks (which it plans to slow to once every 14 days) let it adjust the program's behavior if problems arise. That raises an alarming point: Notifications is pre-release software, tested without users' consent.

Worse yet, Notifications -- unlike other Microsoft updates -- cannot be uninstalled...

This sounds a lot like what SONY did when they covertly installed their unremovable Digital Rights Management spyware. Microsoft sneaks in 'Notifications', you can't remove it, and Microsoft's security firewall, oddly enough, doesn't warn you of its activity.

It's so gratifying to see Microsoft return to its roots. All this nonsense about open file formats was a bit puzzling. Microsoft will only open file formats if they can find a way to get even greater control of their customers. They want, and need, to move to leasing software and a completely unbreakable system lockdown. They'll throw in the PC for free, similar to the way cell phones are sold. This is completely consistent with the needs of their primary customers -- corporations.

Apple would do the same thing if they could, but they have a snarly, bitchy user base. The best they can manage is hardware lockdown -- only they make the hardware. They don't use open file formats (heaven forfend!), but their iWork XML formats can be parsed. They'll follow Microsoft, but here they can't lead.

In the long run I think Apple's world is more promising. Hardware lockdown doesn't conflict with small companies writing software that serves end users directly. Microsoft must control all the software, all the time. Apple only needs to obsolete all existing hardware every three years. (Good thing they've instituted a recycling program ...)

Fulminating about Ann Coulter

Orcinus is ranting about Ann Coulter. I can't manage to get too excited about her. She's an entertainer, a social phenomenon, and a recursive parody of herself. If wee Ann Coulter is enough to tip us into fascism, then we're completely doomed anyway.

Sure she's got people who truly believe her. Really though, I suspect many of her "fans" know she's cracked, but enjoy her ability to enrage some rationalists.

And that, I think, is my first and only post on her.

Japanese American Inernment

History worth revisiting.

Haditha: details on how Kilo Company cracked

Salon has more details on how and why Kilo company cracked at Haditha:

"You want to shoot them" | Salon News

...Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones, who was not involved in the incident but photographed the carnage and helped move the bodies, told the Los Angeles Times that the victims "ranged from little babies to adult males and females. I'll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood."...

... Interviews with Crossan and another Marine who earlier served in the same platoon (3rd platoon, Kilo Company), as well as with military experts and psychologists, help provide some of the context for the reputed events at Haditha. The portrait that emerges is of an exhausted and overextended unit that participated in some of the bloodiest fighting of the Iraq war. The unit had fought at Nasiriyah during the initial invasion of Iraq, and in late 2004 engaged in 10 days of house-to-house combat during the battle for control of Fallujah. And last year -- in the months before the civilian deaths in Haditha -- at least 20 Marines were killed in ambushes and bombings in the town.

Betty McCollum voted against the toxic HR 5252 bill

Congrats and thank you to my House representative, Betty McCollum of Minnesota (Democrat). She voted against the recently passed toxic bill HR 5252: Communications, Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006:

109th Congress, 2nd session, House vote 241 | Congress votes database | washingtonpost.com

Interesting site, btw. This is from the Washington Post's Votes Database.

We will pay the price of this bill for years. In particular, the GOP has just given away our Internet to the cable and phone companies. I am sure they will be richly rewarded.

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).