Philadelphia awaits Dr.Tan

My cousin Allison graduated this week. She'll be doing her residency in Philadelphia. The first part of this week's link-dump will be computation.

• Review of Adrian John's Piracy: As piracy has grown and diversified, so a counterindustry has emerged, dedicated to combating it. The coherence and scope of this industry are relatively new and remarkable. In previous centuries, particular groups or industries mounted efforts against piracy; but they did not generally regard them as fronts in one common cause.
• Social Network opt-out: Recently, some programmers figured out how to computationally do exactly this. By entering in your username and password, the software would delete as much information as possible, ultimately removing the account itself. It was a radical enough idea to attract the legal attention of Facebook.
• 5 Best diagnostic tools: If things haven't gotten bad enough that you're forced to take refuge with a Live CD, SIW is a Windows-based diagnostic tool that can help you get to the bottom of things. SIW is incredibly detailed in its analysis, next to nothing is left uncatalogued from the timings of your memory modules to the DLL files loaded to what applications you have set to autorun at startup. Even if you're not currently experiencing any computer issues, SIW gives you a really interesting peek inside your computer.
• Surprise: All the yapping about our supposedly fast, flat, and wired world fosters bizarre expectations. Computers, we are told, possess and confer power. Out of power comes mastery. Don’t believe it. The fact of the matter is this: We live in a world characterized not by ever-greater speed but by never-ending surprise. No one—not the pope, the president, or even a fast-world guru like Thomas Friedman—knows what’s going to happen next. Those who pretend otherwise are frauds.
• Wikileaks: Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.

Next are a few references to journalism and the concomitant umbrage industry.

• Here is David Brooks, peering down from his perch at the New York Times, offering a tutorial on why ordinary citizens, as opposed to well-heeled newspaper columnists living in the nation’s capital, just don’t understand what makes America tick. Populists, writes Brooks, mistakenly view the country through the lens of social class. Convinced that “economics is a struggle over finite spoils,” they betray an “Us versus Them mentality.” They see politics as a “struggle between the enlightened and the corrupt, the pure and the betrayers.” Brooks wants it known that such heresies (which are, of course, daily fare within the Beltway) possess not even the slightest legitimacy when voiced by ordinary citizens from Indiana or Kansas.
• France has more moustaches than Norway: I just made that up. But the great thing about numbers is that you don’t even need to make them up to make them say anything you want them to say.

Next are the political blogs this week.

• What's in it for US: When discussing the blockade of Gaza, the tendency in the Western media is to focus on what is Israel’s legitimate interest in denying arms shipments in light of the rocket attacks emanating from that territory. However, the reality is that the blockade goes far, far beyond interdicting arms shipments, and instead becomes a policy of collective punishment aimed at severely impoverishing the Gaza region in order to retaliate against the entire population for the majority’s election of Hamas, and perhaps to inspire the population to reject Hamas’ leadership.
• To Bad Not to Fail: Under that setup, the general partners risked their personal net worth on the solvency of their firms and regulated the bank’s activities with the knowledge that they were liable for any losses. When almost all the partnerships reorganized into corporations, investment banks became, in effect, liability casinos operated by croupiers unbridled by long-term financial responsibilities. The sole object was to maximize day-to-day profits.
• Hegemony and Democracy: He is certainly right that hegemonists are inconsistent in their enthusiasm for democracy promotion, as I’ve mentioned many times before. In this view, Venezuelan and Bolivian democracies are blights on the earth, but Georgian democracy is wonderful and vitally important. They used to like Ukrainian democracy until the Ukrainians elected the wrong candidate, and now they’re not so sure it’s a good idea

And the last link is about food. The most important last, in this case.

• Virus Ravages Cassava Plants in Africa: Inside its tan skin, the white flesh was riddled with necrotic brown lumps, as obviously diseased as any tuberculosis lung or cancerous breast. “Even the pigs refuse this,” she said.