Realm of wonders: Ocean census VI

The Independent has an excellent and concise summary of the results of Ocean census VI. The range of what is "possible" in terrestrial organisms continues to expand. If we are still making discoveries of this magnitude in 2006, it is overwhelmingly likely that many more astounding discoveries lie ahead. I am looking forward to the inevitable coffee table book companion to this research report.

Minnesota: what the heck are these people doing here?

Bruce Schneier may be the world's leading geek security expert. He lives in Minneapolis.

Neil Gaiman is a writer of witty fantasy novels, often set at least partly in London, and a hot Hollywood property besides. He lives on the nearby St Croix river. Backpackit, a hot web 2. company, is local. A number of OS X shops are local.

A number of the blogs I read turn out to be unexpectedly written by local folks. What are all these people doing here? For that matter, how the heck did I end up here anyway?

(The influx is likely to worsen. This weekend my son played baseball in shirt sleeves. Outdoors. In December. The ice rinks are all puddles. If word gets out that the Minnesota winter is gone, we'll go the way of Atlanta ...

Thoughtcrime

Schneier is on a roll, but of course he's got great material. I didn't have the heart comment on this when I first read it, but we now have statistical models that will predict the probability of violent crime based on indirect measures and past records. Sigh. Risk scores will lead to more and more hassles for the unfortunates, which is sure to make them feel and act more like outlaws, which will lead to realtime monitoring ...

Those who score too high will yearn for exile to old Australia.

Speeders will be strip searched ... reputation management II

I am so completely unsurprised by this. The US assigns risk scores to travelers, supposedly "international" only (includes Canada!). Emphases mine:

Schneier on Security: American Authorities Secretly Give International Travellers Terrorist "Risk" Score

The scores are assigned to people entering and leaving the United States after computers assess their travel records, including where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.

Have you had more than one speeding ticket in the past five years? Did you order a vegetarian meal for your flight? You should wear clothing that's easy to shed ...

If people ever figure this out, they'll fight every traffic ticket in court tooth and nail ...

Hacking your reputation: the wars begin

Reputation management is an ancient issue, familiar to all who live in small communities. The early digital age was anonymous, but increasingly everyone knows you're a dog. Anonymity is being replaced by its antithesis; the panoptical state of transparency.

Except, of course, the reputations can be hacked. And so the ancient battles restart on new terrain ...

American terrorism: Cuba and the Bush connection

The November issue of The Atlantic reviews thirty years of American terrorism, with a thread of once-removed Bush connections. Emphases mine. Bosh and Postada, anti-Castro cubans, are the alleged masterminds. The youths who blew up the plane were quickly arrested and served twenty years in Venezualan prisons...

Twilight of the Assassins

It was the first act of airline terrorism in the Americas: thirty years ago, seventy-three people died in the bombing of a Cuban passenger plane. Now, one alleged mastermind lives freely in Miami, while another awaits trial on other charges in Texas...

...why did the Reagan and Bush administrations hire Posada and grant Bosch U.S. residency, when the CIA believed they’d had a hand in blowing up the plane?...

...the attention Posada garnered from the Times series was more than he had bargained for. His boasts of masterminding the bombings compromised his supporters in South Florida and New Jersey, some of whom he named as providing him with money. If the attorney general decides to try Posada for acts of terrorism, Exhibit A will be Posada’s own admissions. Two grand juries, one in El Paso and another in Union City, New Jersey, empaneled intermittently to investigate Posada’s activities, have subpoenaed several exile militants and detained one who refused to testify. What’s clear from the meandering investigation, however, is that the Bush Justice Department has been reluctant so far to prosecute this case....

... George H. W. Bush became director of the CIA in January 1976 and served through January 1977. Bush succeeded William Colby... Colby had implemented major reforms, including a prohibition on political assassinations, and was the first director to give major public briefings to Congress on agency operations. These actions deeply alienated some of the CIA’s more committed Cold Warriors, many of whom backed the appointment of Bush.

When Bush took up his post, he offered Ted Shackley, the former head of JMWave, the CIA’s third most powerful job: associate deputy director. Bush appears to have had contacts with Cuban exiles as far back as the 1960s, when, according to a declassified memo by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI briefed him on their response to the assassination of John F. Kennedy...

Shackley was a divisive figure, and relations between Henry Kissinger’s State Department and George Bush’s CIA were painfully strained—so much so, according to William Rogers, the assistant secretary of state for Latin America, that the State Department rarely relied on CIA intelligence. “The agency was controlled by hard-liners,” he said. “They had an agenda, and the intelligence was lousy.” Shackley later played a role in the Iran-Contra affair.

Bush’s tenure at the CIA coincided with the worst spate of bombings and assassinations by Cuban exile militants in Latin America and in the United States. At that time, bombs went off regularly in Miami; sometimes there were several explosions in one day. In December 1975, thirteen bombs went off in forty-eight hours, striking at the very heart of the city: the airport, the police department, the state attorney’s office, the Social Security building, the post office, and the FBI’s main office...

...In 1989, securing Bosch’s release was one of the cornerstones of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s congressional campaign in Miami. She praised Bosch as a hero and a patriot on exile radio stations and raised $265,000 for his legal defense fund. Her campaign manager was a political neophyte, but one who had the ear of the White House. His name was Jeb Bush.

On August 17, 1989, Jeb Bush attended a meeting he had arranged for Ros-Lehtinen with his father to discuss the matter. The following July, President Bush rejected his own Justice Department’s recommendation and authorized Bosch’s release... ... Two years later, the Bush administration granted Bosch U.S. residency.

...In 2002, Governor Jeb Bush appointed Raoul Cantero, Orlando Bosch’s attorney, to the Florida Supreme Court...

The Bush family has not always been unequivocally opposed to terrorists, even terrorists who've bombed American targets. (I'd forgotten about the Miami bombings -- back when Miami was a small town. That was around the time the FLQ was bombing and kidnapping in my home province of Quebec.) I am sure a similar story could be told about many American political families and the IRA. The Bushies and the Kennedys seem to have more than a passing resemblance in several respects.

The story adds another gloss to George W's Oedipal complex, and to the passionate hatred of "terrorism" that became his watchword. As has been pointed out many times, "terrorist" is a relatively meaningless term. It also suggests reasons why Jeb could never have run for the presidency -- even before 9/11.

Lastly, politically controlled and worse-than-worthless intelligence was not an invention of George Jr and Dick in Iraq. George Sr pioneered it when he ran the CIA ...

Humanity: we just can't decide what to do about them

When my fellow Zorgonians gather to discuss the state of humanity, we rend our clothes and tear our hair. And yet ... human civilization has not collapsed yet. There are random and seemingly inexplicable bursts of what almost passes for reason. It is non-linear, truly chaotic, but it cannot be ignored. This human frames it well: Are Humans Totally Stupid? / Either we're hell-bent on self-destruction, or we truly care about the planet. Or, you know, both. Both. Sigh. And so another Zorgonian summit adjourns without any decision on the human problem...

Phillip Carter on the Iraq study group recommendations: mediocre and disappointing

Phillip Carter, officer, veteran, lawyer, blogger, journalist and recent volunteer for Iraqi service, dissects the report the Iraq study group: The Iraq Study Group talked to generals when it should have talked to corporals. - By Phillip Carter - Slate Magazine. Briefly, the study group did a mediocre job. What they got right was obvious, what they missed was enormous. I can't summarize the article, Phil put a vast amount of thought into it. Read it and try to get your local representative to read it.

The Lundehund and the genomic plasticity of canines

Years ago few cared much about the biology of dogs. They are, after all, so common - and so "artificial". It was far more interesting to study wolves or sharks.

Times change. Dogs are weird. They are the among the most successful large terrestrial mammals in history based upon population, range, and their almost complete lack of predators (humans eat dogs in South Korea and in some parts of China). It is likely, given our longstanding commensal relationship, that they have altered human evolution. They have extraordinary variability in aging rates for a single species. They can read human faces and mimic human expressions and emotions. They're very hard to clone, and they have a weirdly plastic genome. Consider the Lundehund:

Damn Interesting � The Norwegian Puffin Dog

...To enhance traction on slippery rocks, and gripping in tight places, the Lundehund is a polydactyl (multi-toed) dog. Instead of the normal four toes a foot, the Lundehund has six toes, all fully formed, jointed and muscled. Polydactyl dogs are not terribly uncommon, but in most breeds the extra toes are dew-claws - non-functional vestigial toes, not the fully formed variety of the Lundehund. The dog uses these extra toes to gain purchase and haul itself along in positions where only the sides of its legs are touching the rock, a fairly common occurrence while wiggling through tight spots. They also help the dog gain additional traction while scrambling around on steep, often slippery cliffs...

The Lundehund is a weird animal, though much of its adaptations may come down to a connective tissue disorder which is also seen in humans (hyperelastic joints). Canine biology is fascinating indeed. The more we look at the history of human "breeds" 30,000 to 100,000 years ago the more interesting canine "breeds" becomes ...

Hail to the volunteer firefighters of Antioch, Illinois

Not every search works. All too often the rescuers find nothing, or a body. This time, in the dark of a cold night, they struck gold.

Wisconsin boy missing from hunting party found alive

... Two Antioch, Ill. firefighters, who were part of a large search group, found Ben Maerzke of Kenosha laying in the snow at about 1:40 a.m. Sunday about a quarter of a mile from where rescuers stationed their command post, sheriff's Sgt. Horace Staples and Floeter said.

... Staples said the boy was coherent but about to fall asleep and in a deep hypothermic state when firefighters found him in the 1,000-acre New Munster Wildlife Area.

... He was taken to Memorial Hospital in Burlington, where he was recovering from frostbite to his feet on Sunday night, the television station reported. He was to be kept overnight in the hospital and possibly released as early as Monday afternoon, the station said.

It's about 16 miles from Antioch to Wheatland. The Antioch firefighters are volunteers:

...The Antioch fire department consists of volunteer firefighters and a volunteer rescue squad...

These men (and women) were joined by a "large" (I'd guess hundreds) group of fellow heroes and family in the dark cold night. Hail to them all. They shouldn't need to pay for their beer for a while.

Update 12/7/06: Across the nation, another story of search ended in a mixture of sorrow and rescue. A two state search is so difficult, it is a minor miracle that Mr Kim's family was found alive. Rest easy Mr. Kim, you did all a father could do.

Wisconsin: 10. Minnesota: 1. State health rankings

As a Minnesotan, I am obliged to point out that Wisconsin was barely in the top 10:

State health rankings: The best and the worst

TOP 10

1. Minnesota
2. Vermont
3. New Hampshire
4. Hawaii
5. Connecticut
6. Utah
7. Massachusetts
8. North Dakota
9. Maine
10. Wisconsin

BOTTOM 10

41) Florida
42) Georgia
43) West Virginia
44) Oklahoma
45) Alabama
46) Arkansas
47) Tennessee
48) South Carolina
49) Mississippi
50) Louisiana

I must confess our ranking does not only reflect the smart living of Minnesotans. Yes, we do sweep the bicycle paths in January, and they do get used (I was once among the users, but now I have dependents). Yes smoking is less common every day. I must confess, however, that winter is hard on the infirm. They tend to die or move south.

Funny. Cruel. Apple and the Zune.

Daring Fireball: Conjectural Transcript of the Upcoming Negotiations Between Apple and Universal Music.

In which Jobs smiles.

MySpace debacle: virtual weapon or virtual parasite?

This is why evolved (vs. designed, ie bioweapons) organisms don't kill their hosts immediately:

MySpace worm uses QuickTime for exploit:

... The social networking site MySpace.com is under what one computer security analyst called an 'amazingly virulent' attack caused by a worm that steals log-in credentials and spreads spam that promotes adware sites.

The worm is infecting MySpace profiles with such efficiency that an informal scan of 150 found that close to a third were infected, said Christopher Boyd, security research manager at FaceTime Communications Inc.

MySpace, owned by News Corp., is estimated to have at least 73 million registered users.

The worm works by using a cross-scripting weakness found about two weeks ago in MySpace and a feature within Apple Computer Inc.'s QuickTime multimedia player....

....MySpace's "seemingly random tendency" to expire user sessions or log out users makes it less noticeable to victims that an attack is under way, according to a Nov. 16 advisory by the Computer Academic Underground....

...spam messages contain a file that appears to be a movie but instead is a link to a pornographic site that also hosts adware from Zango Inc., Boyd said. Zango, formerly 180 Solutions Inc., settled last month with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for $3 million over complaints that it didn't properly ask the consent of users before its adware was installed...

So, is this a (virtual) bioweapon aimed at Zango, with MySpace as a incidental casualty, a weapon aimed at MySpace with Zango as a red herring, or a very, very badly designed Zango-funded phishing scam?

If the latter, it's a great way to teach biology. Evolved parasites don't kill their hosts outright -- what's the point?

BTW, this is also technically interesting. The bug appears to be in MySpace, but there's a more subtle problem as well. QuickTime has a lot of embedded scripting power -- which can be used for good or ill. Flash does the same sort of thing. There's a tricky problem here with functional boundaries; features required for market success may become a part of emergent exploits. There must be biological equivalents; we should learn from how evolution manages compartmentalization. In the meantime, the advantages of adding functionality to software should be increasingly balanced against the likelihood of creating new exploits. One of the 2-3 buzzwords for the next 20 years will be 'complexity management'.

Neandertal: not gently into the night

Our primary ancestors, the skinnies, arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago. There they found the remnants of the Neandertal (var: Neanderthal), one of many variants (species? subspecies? "breeds"? races?) of human. Cold adapted they'd survived for what we'd call a "long time", seemingly changing little. Thousands of years before the coming of the skinnies, however, the Neandertal were already suffering greatly....

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Hungry ancients 'turned cannibal'

.... Starvation and cannibalism were part of everyday life for a population of Neanderthals living in northern Spain 43,000 years ago, a study suggests.

Bones and teeth from the underground cave system of El Sidron in Asturias bear the hallmarks of a tough struggle for survival, researchers say.

Analysis of teeth showed signs of starvation or malnutrition in childhood and human bones have cut marks on them.

Details appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Some bones appeared to have been dismembered and broken open, possibly to allow access to marrow and brains.

"Given the high level of developmental stress in the sample, some level of survival cannibalism would be reasonable," the scientists wrote in their research paper.

The team, led by Dr Antonio Rosas from the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, also found that the bones shared physical features with other European Neanderthals from the same period.

Dr Rosas and colleagues found a north-south variation in Neanderthal jaw bones, suggesting that populations from southern parts of Europe had wider, flatter faces.

The findings may help shed light on the life and death of the Neanderthals, which became extinct about 10,000 years after the arrival of modern humans in Europe around 40,000 years ago.

Many experts believe they were not able to compete with the moderns for food and shelter.

The Neandertal did not go gently, or slowly. For 13,000 years, about four times the length of our recorded history, they declined as the earth warmed and the techies flourished -- taking caves and food with adaptive technologies and techniques. The skinnies liked the warmer weather. The Neandertal probably did too ... until they realized it came with a price.

Thirteen thousands years is a lot of hardship, though there must have been centuries of better times ...

Oppenheimer and the falling cost of havoc

I've blogged tediously about the falling cost of havoc. I didn't know, though I might have guessed, that Oppenheimer was far ahead of me (genius does that)...

How to Get a Nuclear Bomb (The Atlantic, December 2006)

... In 1946 Robert Oppenheimer sketched the problem clearly. In an essay titled “The New Weapon,” he wrote: “Atomic explosives vastly increase the power of destruction per dollar spent, per man-hour invested; they profoundly upset the precarious balance between the effort necessary to destroy and the extent of the destruction.” Elaborating, he wrote,

None of these uncertainties can becloud the fact that it will cost enormously less to destroy a square mile with atomic weapons than with any weapons hitherto known to warfare. My own estimate is that the advent of such weapons will reduce the cost, certainly by more than a factor of ten, more probably by a factor of a hundred. In this respect only biological warfare would seem to offer competition for the evil that a dollar can do.

I suspct Oppenheimer would have been surprised by our continued survival. I think of that when I contemplate how much the cost of havoc has fallen since his day. Whether by angels, aliens, or some emergent property of humankind, we seem to have cheated the odds. I hope the angels aren't tiring ...