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