Like Kearny St. after the rain

The result of an earthquake in Taiwan in April of this year.

Via: TYWKIDBI

No sir, I don't need any details

We had a ship on Pier 30-32 this week. We were a bit short of proper security people, so I ended up standing at the gateway giving directions to the passengers. (no, the hippies and the sea lions both moved North a while back... yes the ferry boats dock at the ferry building, are you asking about something else? .. F line to the Castro, be back by 5:30) As you can tell from the frequency of my posting, I've been busy. The first link is a good old fashoned snarl.

• A Brief History of Time Wasted: This cocksure claim begs to be differed with because humans in this post Y2K America really don’t need Satan to unleash the horrors of Hell anymore. We do quite well enough on our own, thank you very much. Being cheerful Americans, we’ve concocted our very own Hell-On -Earth with a Happy Face, a kind of sprightly ornamented Skinner Box Sit Com of relentlessly droning idiocy.

The next set involves the sciences and the uses the political class puts them to.

• The Last Countdown: At present, it looks like there will be two more space shuttle launches. That’s it. Within a year, our nation will no longer have the capability to launch humans into space. For some this is a sure sign that America is sliding into mediocrity.
• Bizarre Robot Traders: The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren't doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there's no way they'd ever be part of a trade.
• One step ahead of the future: What if there was a way to predict how a virus is going to evolve? What if technology could help peer into the future and see the next steps in mutation? What if there was a missile warning system for incoming viral threats?
• Iran Fights Malware Attacking Computers: Stuxnet, which was first publicly identified several months ago, is aimed solely at industrial equipment made by Siemens that controls oil pipelines, electric utilities, nuclear facilities and other large industrial sites.

Media soul searching. The media doesn't have a soul, it's owned and operated. They must have pre-printed articles like this one, with fill in the blank areas for the specific mea culpa, because like the sales down this Christmas article you see every year, the same outline pops up on a weekly basis. If it draws eyeballs to advertising, it's professional journalism.

• Forbes Article Spurs Media Soul Searching: I received a call yesterday from Nathan Verdi, a fact checker at Forbes, who was calling to fact check your article after it was published. (Is this how journalism works now?)

Keeping up on science fiction. As a side note, I haven't read Zero History yet and every time I stop to buy it, something comes up. Soon come on that one.

• Science influenced by science fiction: There’s not a lot of science fiction around these days, so pretty soon science will have to put up with being influenced by paranormal romance.
  I never minded that working scientists were influenced by science fiction, but I was always impressed by what bad science fiction scientists liked. It was usually junk that they had read back when they were 14, before they had to knuckle down and earn a doctorate.

The remainder of the links are political. I'll end with Lapham's interview: an upbeat reflection as opposed to the fear-mongering we recieve as daily fare.

• The End of an Insurgency: As the Obama administration weighs its strategy, it would be wise to consider the history of 89 insurgencies in the second half of the twentieth century. How governments manage to defeat -- or be defeated by -- insurgencies reveals a number of lessons for Washington today.
• Americans Turning Against Hegemonism: A large majority (69-28%) said that it was “mostly good” for Turkey and Brazil to become more independent of U.S. foreign policy, which suggests that the hysterical anti-Turkish reaction in the last few months has a very limited base of support. I should note that the questions might have biased the result towards the “mostly good” side by explaining that Turkish and Brazilian independence in foreign policy would mean that they do not rely on the U.S. as much.
• Lewis Lapham on the end of capitalism: It’s faith in the spirit and mechanics and moral value of capitalism. It is a country of expectant millionaires. You have the notions of risk, of labor put to a productive use, deferred pleasure — ideas that come out of our Puritan ancestry.

Pete's Back from the Cape

Sunspot in Detail

NJIT Distinguished Professor Philip R. Goode and the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) team have achieved “first light” using a deformable mirror in what is called adaptive optics at BBSO. An image of a sunspot was published Aug. 23, 2010 on the website of Ciel et l'Espace, as the photo of the day.
“This photo of a sunspot is now the most detailed ever obtained in visible light,” according to Ciel et l’Espace. In September, the popular astronomy magazine will publish several more photos of the Sun taken with BBSO’s new adaptive optics system.

More at link

Moon Festival Java Time

This week has been a stuff-'o'-rama extravaganza. Oracle / Java has a huge exhibition at Moscone. Streets blocked south of Market, shuttle busses all over the place, and everyone suddenly has an opinion about some aspect of cloud computing. It's also the weekend of the Moon Festival next door to me in Chinatown. Both events have conspired to produce a tsunami of folks that aren't quite sure where they are or what they're doing there. But everyone seems to be having a good time, and things sort themselves out by daybreak, so what the heck. The first three links are humor. (at least I hope they're humor).

• How to Spot a Spy: So it is possible that there are spies in your midst, blending in and going about their daily business just the same as you, only covertly, and probably with a lot more riding on the outcome than most of our daily toiling. It is equally possible, of course, that our wild imaginings are creating spies out of people and situations that are perfectly innocent or un-spy related.
• The Top 5 foreign policy initiatives of the Tea Party: But given the ever increasing strength spinning up this storm that's sweeping across the American landscape (Tropical Storm Sarah?), the world's questions will soon be answered. Tea Partiers will inevitably be elected. Maybe a bunch of them. And soon the world will have to deal with the policy initiatives of the Tea Party Caucus in the Congress.
• Consensus Statement on Morality: I dunno why these big-brain “EDGE” guys are making such a fuss here about “morality.” Everybody knows that morality is whatever God says. And God says, whatever me, my best friends, and my hierarchical coalition say that God says.

The next set is a bit of theology paired with an essay denoting every worker's nagging feeling that they've just taken it in the touchis ... again.

• Beck, Christianity, and Individual Rights: Traditional soteriology in the patristic era taught that Christ assumed human nature like ours in every respect except for sin, which meant that He assumed a sinless humanity that was substantiated in His Person, the Person of the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity.
• The Tea Party: There is a lot of truth to this. There is a visceral dislike among at least some conservative and Republican elites who have little more than disdain for the rank-and-file supporters who make their careers possible. While they are willing to tolerate the rank-and-file so long as they remain in a supporting role, they will absolutely refuse to accept them as equals, much less as leaders.

The next is our bit for the media / showbiz. The talking heads (Sunday yap-yap shows) are all a-flutter over Dinesh D'Sousa's Forbes article. Will some obscure academic bring down the President? Can his laser-sharp insights be denied? Will Scooby Doo get away from the lake monster? Some of these folks need to get out more. Maybe have a moon cake. They only bake this large a variety once a year, and they'll be gone by Tuesday too.

• All Eyes on the Horse Race: We all know today’s news cycle as generated and perpetuated by the cable news/Internet bubble is famously ephemeral. It’s certainly nothing new to say that we live in an age when stories explode in clouds of links, only to disappear like so much smoke before the next “publish” button is clicked.

Here is a crypto page, with links to some more detailed papers.

• Post Quantum Cryptography: Here's the one-minute introduction: "Imagine that it's fifteen years from now. Somebody announces that he's built a large quantum computer. RSA is dead. DSA is dead. Elliptic curves, hyperelliptic curves, class groups, whatever, dead, dead, dead. So users are going to run around screaming and say 'Oh my God, what do we do?

The remaining links are political in nature. The one that makes me think impure thoughts is the radical President essay. Written by an foreign policy expert, you can read it two ways. 1) As written or 2) Where would the writer's cushy internationalism, deal making, and generally unsupervised lifestyle go if America elected a President who was concerned about Americans. It must be so tough. (another round, and freshen the caviar. I'm about to generate an opinion.)

• The Radical Presidency: After America's century-long rise to world hegemony, the presidency is a vastly different institution than it was in the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The next few decades will be equally transformative, but in ways that will cause great difficulty for the sober formulation of U.S. foreign policy.
• The insurgency next door: I note that Clinton used the phrase "We [the United States] face an increasing threat ...," not "they [Mexico]." The cartels are transnational shipping businesses, with consumers in the United States as their dominant market. The clashes over shipping routes and distribution power -- which over the past four years have killed 28,000 and thoroughly corrupted Mexico's police and judiciary -- could just as well occur inside the United States.
• Interdependency Theory: In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the economies of North America and Europe remain fragile while those of Asia continue to grow. This is especially true in the cases of China and India, which both boast near double-digit rates of growth and have therefore inspired confidence around the region.

Things not taught in Public School

Buy the right house: Actually, that’s pretty much it. Federal farm subsidies are paid out to help keep farmers in business. The intention is to stabilize farmers’ income to counteract erratic weather and fluctuations on commodity prices. Unfortunately, the subsidies are notoriously mismanaged. In 2006, the Washington Post investigated the lax attitude surrounding the allocations of these funds. Surprisingly, the most egregious offenders were suburban McMansion dwellers. Reporters found that the cash payouts remained tied to the land-long after that land stopped being used for farming. The journalists also found realtors and developers advertising the subsidies as a selling point on lots and houses. In 2005, one area of Texas brought in $37 million in rice farm subsidies-most of it going to either non-farmers or farmers who no longer grew rice at all.

Squirrels in Your Hard Drive

Pictured (1956) is an IBM 350 RAMAC drive with 5MB storage. Today's malware would barely fit on it, but a family of squirrels would probably find it a nice, warm, and dry place to nest.

Via: Susan

Three Penny Candy for a Nickel

Responding to a question, Kalam said the nuclear non-proliferation treaty has become useless as cyber war would be more devastating for all the countries with networked financial and economic resources.

Rather than insert an extension into the previous page, I decided to post separately. I've spent a free afternoon trying to follow the ins and outs of our economic system, as opposed to the system of making and selling things. I also borrowed an e-book, Through the Looking Glass, from the library. Guess which one makes more sense. Hint: it also contains some great illustrations of what looks like a fun tea party.

A small entertainment can stand in for the current state of affairs, as best as I can sus them out. Suppose I asked you, the reader, to dig into your pocket and lend me three cents. The understanding would be that I would return your three cents in ten minutes along with an extra penny for your trouble. Now in our part of town, three cents is enough to buy a penny candy and you might assume that that was my plan. Nope. Upon receiving the pennies, I discover that their value is in fact one million dollars. Scoff all you want, but my rating agency has confirmed this fact. (it works real darn quick cuz I'm the owner and have a deadline) Since I want to turn this serendipitous windfall into regular money you can use at the grocer, I insure it with my very own insurance company. This is fine because now my insurance company has a million dollar account in paper debt. Discount the paper by $20 and AIG will buy it and in turn sell it to Uncle Sam. I'm left with an insured, AAA piece of paper, which I sell to the Fed, and still hold your three pennies. I return two pennies and intone the magic words: market swing, front loading, management fees, and of course, Our Way Of Life. Sadly the price of penny candy has gone up because the new millionaire on the block is willing to pay a nickel for them.

In real life, there are more people on the chain, so the individual profits are smaller, and somewhere on the concatenation a spoilsport might call the debt. It crashes, we bail the participants, a speech or two and maybe a baby for the wolves, then back to tending the Engine that Pulls our Economy. Sorry, even when you study, follow the math, look up the numbers and references, and make a good faith effort to understand, it makes about that much sense.

The Bill's Not Virtual

Computerized Stock Trading: Most of those trades aren't coming from trigger-happy day traders and mutual fund managers with billions of dollars at their disposal. It's a flood of machine-gun speed fury coming from an army of computers programmed to obey complicated algorithms that are hyperactively buying and selling.

In other words, the original idea of a stock being a share or investment in a company, i.e. Aunt Mary saving for her retirement or Dr. Tan building a nest egg, has been ditched in favor of a Second Life style virtual game. Producing a product or service doesn't seem to have much to do with anything. All well and good as far as it goes, but add to this lark a Government entity (the Fed) that pegs the value of virtual money to real money, i.e. markers exchangeable for real goods or services , at a strict one to one. An electronic hick-up awards a million e-dollars to Princling, Princling and Lickdicker, the Fed dutifully prints up the cash, and the market readjusts the value of your stash to keep everything on an even keel. Boy howdy, you're in the game without having to lift a finger. Mention the idea of a market determined exchange rate from virtual to real and you too can learn the definition of constructional dyspraxia. (but it sez I produced the equivalent of 60,279 bushels of wheat by clicking this here button. It's right on the screen...) At your next dinner party, try serving a picture of the meal to get a sense of where the problem lies.

Dressed to Sell

Today is the `Opera in the Park` show in Golden Gate. You get to hear some of the best singers of the season, grab a nosh while the glitterati are patting themselves on the back, and lounge in the sun. I'm in. The first set of links relate to economics.

• Understanding America's Class System: For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.
• Scott vs. Hayek: And because it is standardized, the person who comes from the corporate headquarters can come with a kind of checklist in which every place is more or less the same, and they can check on cleanliness, quality, productivity and conformity to the corporate standard.
• Rome is Burning: This is a failure of our basic institutions of production. The job of the market is to bring together willing buyers with willing sellers in order to produce value. This is not happening and as a result literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced.

Next a bit of hackery in the Sterling style.

• Hacktivist: The deniable patriot hacktivists who work for Russia, China and India can talk just as patriotically as any Fox News fan. So, if you’re from USA and hammering Russia for underhanded cyberattacks, you’ve gotta figure out what America’s own “citizen hacker vigilantes” are up to someplace. And your answer is, you don’t have the foggiest idea. Not a clue, brother.

Now for the culture portion of the show.

• Overcoming Obstacles: Pick the right time and day to approach the steps at the foot of Citadel Hill, Halifax’s central tourist site/fortress, and you will encounter a ragtag group of people behaving in a rather unusual way: balancing delicately on the railings, hanging off of the walls, leaping up over them from the sidewalk, and bantering on the hillside grass.
• The OED: Bibliophilic considerations aside, however, the OED Online is my dictionary of choice. This remarkable resource displays both the second edition of the OED, published with great fanfare in 20 volumes in 1989, and the gradually accumulating third edition, begun in 2000 and due to be completed some decades hence.
• Technique and Food: Technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity. As Jacques Ellul argues in The Technological Society, in such a society the multiplicity of means is reduced to one: the most efficient.

I was paging through the TV channels this morning (Sun) while I was cleaning the hovel. In almost every case a talking head was castigating the other media outlets and patting himself (or herself) on the back for the team's nuanced reporting of a report about the influence of an article about a report on a blog that said... In other words, the TV version of a circle jerk. The P.R. department has become a primary news source and some jake, with the approved ethno-signifiers (discrete gold cross nestled in a not so discrete décolleté, refined hint of indeterministic accent), gets elevated to expert status. (as long as you can read the teleprompter) Thank God for the cartoon channel. At least the inside references are both clever and inclusive. This little jeremiad brings us to the last links: politics

• Obama, Anticolonial Hegemonist?: Dinesh D’Souza has authored what may possibly be the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet written. He takes a number of decisions Obama has made on a grab-bag of issues, declares that they are “odd,” and then proceeds to explain the “oddness” he has perceived by cooking up a bizarre thesis that Obama is a die-hard anticolonialist dedicated to his father’s anticolonialist legacy.
• The Tricky New American Moment: Let's take alliances first. Clinton celebrated NATO, ritualistically, as "the world's most successful alliance." Left unmentioned was the growing divergence among U.S. and European politicians—and their electorates—on its ultimate purpose.
• Taming the Tea Parties: All of this is rank nonsense. Federal power has been exploding for decades under Republican as well as Democratic administrations. And it is not at all clear that what George Washington or even Dwight Eisenhower understood as “constitutional limits” on federal power were the ones that still existed under George W. Bush. What Lowry and his crew really want is to neutralize the Tea Party.

Satoshi Kon

Satoshi Kon, a Japanese filmmaker and comic-book artist whose dazzling visual compositions and humane, emotionally resonant stories won him a devoted following in animation circles and beyond, died in Tokyo on Tuesday. He was 46.

Obituary in the NYT and a rememberance by Michael Swanwick here.

Oh Boy, Comics

For comic fans, history fans, and comics history fans, the Digital Comics Museum is offering downloads and scans of public domain comic books from the 1940s and ’50s. There are a massive amount of titles and issues available, from Captain Science to Sherlock Holmes to Frisky Fairy Tales to the chaste Sweet Sixteen Magazine, and many, many more. You can also find the very same horror comics that led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority. Via: Tor.com

The link is at Digital Comic Museum. Yes, they do have Cow Puncher Comics.
Note: If you download in .cbz, you can simply rename it .zip; if you choose .cbr, you can find a free reader on google. .rar you can use RARfrog, again free on google.

Banana Boat

Via: BoingBoing. No point, rhyme or reason as far as I can tell. It's just a banana boat.

Jerry Lee Lewis

September 29, seventy five years old.

Million Breasted Cow Suckers

Labor day is almost over. One of the weekend's headlines was 'The CEOs that fired the most people received the largest salary". My personal bug-a-bear this week is Senator Simpson and the million breasted cow suckers. My guess is that he'll stop collecting on his senator's pension, special medical insurance deal, and the other perks he didn't pay into as soon as he realizes that that would help the debt... Then again, maybe not. Ragging on Vietnam vet's disability benifits is a pretty long stretch for a guy who spent his two years driving a desk around in Germany. Parallel universe, whiskey in the kool-aid, not enough ventilation in the limo, who the heck knows.

The first links are cyber security related. The one about cracking the quantum encryption shows a major weak point. It was in fact cracked at a hardware point, which is where most monkey business is done. The weak spot isn't some Alice, hidden in an underground bunker in West Slovinia, it's at the origination and destination points. With Homeland handing out Top Secret ratings hither and thiver combined with the turf-walls that seem to grow like mushrooms, COMSEC security becomes a bit illusionary.

• Successful Attack Against a Quantum Cryptography System: Quantum cryptography is often touted as being perfectly secure. It is based on the principle that you cannot make measurements of a quantum system without disturbing it. So, in theory, it is impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept a quantum encryption key without disrupting it in a noticeable way, triggering alarm bells.
• NEW DELHI: Borrowing a page from China’s art of cyber war, the government is giving shape to an IT infrastructure setup manned by a small army of software professionals to spy on the classified data of hostile nations by hacking into their computer systems. (((Lemme know if you find their shoulder-patch.)))
• HP Holds Navy Network ‘Hostage’ for $3.3 Billion: It’s become a Washington cliché that the military and the intelligence community rely too much on outside contractors. Everyone from President Obama to Defense Secretary Robert Gates has promised to cut back on Pentagon outsourcing. But the Navy’s ongoing inability to separate itself from Hewlett-Packard – after years of trying – shows how difficult that withdrawal is going to be.
• Iran to search for WMD on its own: Now, in the case of Iran, we know very little about this new search enterprise; some fear that it might create some kind of an intranet in Iran -- but that's about it. Let's assume it would be very expensive and very ineffective -- not unreasonable assumptions to make in the context of a sluggish state like Iran, which has a few other things to take care of before exploring the world of Web2.0 in all its glory.

Next is a continuation of the computer meme. The commentator, Marc Thiessen, comes across as a tough American hard-butt, but the record shows him to be a Toupac, in the limo headed South when the going gets tough. He hasn't got the message that the real tough guys don't have to tell you over and over about how manly their manhood is.

• The Best Part About WikiLeaks: Honestly, the best part about the whole Wikileaks phenomenon is the spectacle of Mark Thiessen saying that America should invade Iceland to kill or capture Julian Assange.
• McClatchy D.C. Law
• Philip Brennan

The next two could be filed under philosophy.

• Does Language control thought: Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute.
• Christianity and the West: Whenever I see or hear politically conservative and religiously traditionalist Christians make an argument like this, it brings me up a little short. There is some truth in this claim, but it seems to me that it is especially important for traditionalist Christians to distinguish between arguing for the undeniable Christian heritage of Western societies and the importance of Christianity for the flourishing of those societies, which Christians should argue for, and making claims for the direct link between modern political arrangements and the Gospel.

And last, that darn old politics.

• How Washington Rules: Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility
• Whitewashing the Failure in Iraq: On the eve of President Obama's speech to the nation on Iraq, some of the people who dreamed up this foolish war or helped persuade the nation that it was a good idea are getting out their paintbrushes and whitewash. I refer, of course, to the twin op-eds in today's New York Times by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and neoconservative columnist David Brooks.
• The Nuclear Domino Myth: But there's one problem with this "nuclear domino" scenario: the historical record does not support it. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, many have feared rapid and widespread nuclear proliferation; 65 years later, only nine countries have developed nuclear weapons.

Who gets the new toy

Via: Singularity Hub - Yet what Uncle Sam has over many other bio-inspired robots is its modular design. Built from repeated segments of sensors and actuators, modular bots let you construct larger machines out of relatively simple building blocks. As we’ve discussed before, modular robotics also allow the possibility for robot to self assemble in the field, and to be easily repaired if a section is damaged.

Right off the bat, I can see this being useful to rescue squads. Mount an IR camera and a microphone cluster uplinked to a Fourier processor and you could hunt for survivors in mines or earthquake damaged buildings. On the other hand, Homeland's terror apparatchik might want to classify it for its own use. If it can fit up the loo pipe, it must be publicly accessible; no warrant needed.

Kyoto No-No

Via: BoingBoing. Living next to S.F. Chinatown, I've become used to somewhat ungainly translations.You know the drill: tense mixups, singular / plural mixups, elisions, and idioms that just don't fit. On the other hand, I've seen Cantonese speaking waitresses do their best to hide a smile when a Mr. Multicultural attempts to order dinner off the chalkboard. As great as it is, machine translation (google for most of us) can still let a few boners through. (so to speak)

Tushery

That's another way to put it.

Hurricane Earl from above

NASA / Hurricane Earl

In this photograph captured with a digital SLR camera by NASA astronaut Douglas Wheelock, Earl had a distinct eye that spanned about 17 miles (28 kilometers). Most of the storm had a seemingly uniform top, though the bottom edge of the image gives some sense of the towering thunderheads forming over the ocean. The solar panels of the ISS remind us that the sun is still shining, at least on ISS Expedition 24.

Auditions for something

Via: Presurfer - Somebody has way too much time on his hands.

Downtown Octopus