Back from Montreal. No energy to try and write a con report right now... but it was a hell of a Worldcon. Paul Krugman's two talks were definitely high points, as were several panels, and a great deal of meeting some very interesting people.

But something better than a con report is a book report! Paolo Bacigalupi has a novel out (released just this Friday, Amazon doesn't seem to realize it yet) called The Windup Girl. This is the best new SF (not fantasy, not spec fic) novel I've come across in the past few years. It takes place in an intricately thought-out near-future Bangkok, where the consequences of genetic engineering of crops, climate change, and political shift have all taken their toll. It follows four different protagonists: an American expat working for an agribusiness conglomerate, trying to get access to Thai seed stocks; a Chinese refugee of a Malaysian genocide, working for this American while trying to build a life for himself; a captain of the Thai environmental ministry, which is locked in a complicated war with other factions of the government; and the title character, a genetically engineered "new woman" created to be a personal secretary, now abandoned in Bangkok and living in a brothel.

This book works out the consequences of the SFnal ideas in it as thoroughly as Charles Stross works his out; but what will grab you about this book are the rich characters, their deep and conflicting motivations, the depth of realization of the world. It has one very interesting structural feature: although there are four protagonists, and the chapters cycle points of view, this book doesn't do the usual (and IMHO, slightly annoying) multi-PoV thing of having four separate stories that one is bounced between. Instead, each chapter leads seamlessly into the next; the camera simply moves to follow one character, and then the next, as they all move through the same (very gripping) plot.

If you're at all in to serious SF, this is a book worth picking up. It manages to combine the conceptual rigor of the best hard SF with the characterization and writing of... well, of a really damned good book. Go read it.

P.S.: The publisher, Nightshade Books, is putting out a lot of other interesting stuff lately. For example, if you are interested in vampires, or post-apocalypses either with or without zombies, they can set you up.

America just doesn't take its elections seriously enough. Our last two elections, we got about 55% of the voting-age population going to the polls, and that was unusually high.

Now take a look at Iran. Why, in some towns, their voter turnout was as high as 141%. Now that's a country that takes its democracy seriously.

The Fiat 500 will soon be sold in the US. (Well, "soon" by auto industry standards, a mere year and a half from now. I have no idea what takes this much lead time.) And they're planning on reintroducing Alfa Romeos, as well.

But they've hastened to reassure people that the new Chrysler acquisition doesn't mean that we'll be seeing lots of Fiats; we can keep expecting Chrysler design and engineering:

“Chrysler will not be producing Fiat models, but new Chrysler models based on Fiat technology (platforms, drivetrain, suspension) clothed in a pure Chrysler style,” [Fiat spokesman Richard] Gadeselli explained. Chrysler will design and engineer up to six of its own small or midsize vehicles based on Fiats.

“There is a misconception that Chrysler is going to build cars like the Fiat Bravo and just stick a Chrysler badge on it,” he added. “Actually, the vehicle architectures will be based on our stuff, and there will be some shared powertrains. But the vehicles will be U.S. vehicles, designed for U.S. customers by a U.S. company.”

From the WP: In China, Would-Be Protesters Pay a Price.

Summary of the article: China made a lot of noise during the Olympics about how it would allow peaceful protests in three special zones. A total of 77 applications were made to protest; none were actually approved. Those who didn't withdraw their petitions quickly enough are now in jails, mental hospitals, and so on.

An interesting, if little-known, fact is that China's laws guarantee absolute freedom of speech. However, they don't guarantee freedom after speech.

If you have some free time, you need to read this. It's an article from the Angelus, journal of the Society of St. Pius X, titled Defense of the Inquisition.

What's fascinating about this article is that it isn't what you think it is -- if you're expecting a modern historical reexamination, showing that the Inquisition wasn't what we thought it was, you're going to be mistaken. This is a modern historical reexamination showing that the Inquisition was exactly what you thought it was, and a detailed argument that this is a good thing, and ought to be reinstituted.

I wasn't expecting that.

Another joint analysis of the developing Gaza situation with amysun. Read and enjoy!

(And those of you who follow my blog for politics may want to start reading hers, as well. We're probably going to do many more of these joint posts in the future.)

It's an interesting developing situation. I mispredicted: I expected that if Israel rolled into Gaza on the ground, it would do quick deep-penetration manoeuvers to wipe out selected "hard targets" which couldn't be hit from the air. Instead, it appears that this is a massed-force invasion. Part of this probably means that intelligence wasn't quite good enough to really wipe out the bulk of Hamas' military capability from the air. (DEBKA reports that the first day of bombing eliminated about 1,800 of Hamas' 8,000 Qassam [short-range] rockets, and the campaign so far has eliminated about 50% of their Grad [longer-range] rockets. At Hamas' new reduced rate of 80 rockets per day, they are still armed for about 2 months of firing, which is long enough for a war to end and for them to resupply.) Another thing this means is that Israel is probably going to go after Hamas' built-up infrastructure more thoroughly, including their enormous network of underground bunkers and facilities. That's going to be a particularly brutal sort of warfare, but it's probably necessary since the Gaza Strip is one of the most heavily tunneled places in the world.

I'd still conjecture that the invasion is meant to last on the scale of weeks rather than months, but there's now the distinct possibility that Israel will still be occupying significant ground positions within Gaza when Obama is inaugurated.

Ah, a new year. A perfect time to start posting about things going "Boom" in the Middle East.

This time, though, the post isn't going to be here. The lovely and talented amysun and I have been sitting together over the past few days and discussing the situation in Gaza in great depth, and she's posted her summary of the situation, together with a good backgrounder for those who are just joining, over on her blog. So head on over and take a look.

Thanks to a number of music-loving friends, and their friends as well, the mysterious music has been identified. It's Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D. The mysterious theme I remembered was the entry of the full orchestra at measure 127 of the first movement.

Victory!!

I really wish there were some systematic way to identify music that you can partially remember.

I've got a bit of music that's been stuck in my head, quite literally, for several years. It's symphonic, with strings leading the melody and some fairly serious horns backing them up. I'm fairly sure it's late 19th- or early 20th-century Russian; it's fairly classical in its style, but has that special bombast of Russian nationalist music. More Tchaikovsky than Rachmaninoff. It sounds like the final movement of a string concerto or (more likely) a symphony, but I'm not sure if it's the main theme or a secondary theme. It's in a minor key -- I think f minor, but I don't really trust my ability to remember an exact pitch after this many years.

Now the question is... given all of this, and the ability to hum the melody (or even transcribe it, I suppose)... how the hell can I figure out what piece it is?

(I've tried going to Amazon and listening to as many samples of pieces as I could find that might match this. Not much luck. There's a lot of music out there.)

Anyone have any ideas?

I've gone through an enormous emotional roller-coaster today. This morning, halfway through filling out my ballot, I was struck hard by a sense of civic pride, hard enough that I had to pause for a moment before continuing. I had just voted for a man named "Barack Hussein Obama," who is black and half-Kenyan, and I was allowed to vote for him, and there was a reasonable chance he would be elected president.

Do you know what this means? It means that all of the stuff they taught us in elementary school, about how democracy is supposed to work, is actually true. Despite all of the cynicism we've acquired over the years, it turned out to be true for the simple reason that enough people thought it was that it happened that way.

That's not to say that this country doesn't have flaws; but systematically, as a people, we see them as flaws to be corrected, not the way that they should be.




A few weeks ago, I read an article in the Washington Post interviewing people in Virginia about how they planned to vote. One man that they were interviewing told the interviewer (angrily) what his plans were: "I'm voting for the nigger."

No, I'm not going to bleep that word out. I want you to read it and realize all the things that sentence means. This is someone who by his own admission is racist; who is not well-educated, who does not live in a big city, who would call someone that in front of a journalist without being ashamed of it.

And this person thought about the country, and thought about his choices, and decided that he would, nonetheless, vote for him. The interview made it clear; he was thinking about the candidates' economic and foreign policies, and made a decision based on his feelings and the issues.

Know what that means? That the American people aren't stupid at all. They can have feelings and even prejudices, and still think about things and make decisions based on more than just that. The average American actually seems to understand the issues of this election pretty well. And I find that inspiring.





Today I saw some editorials interviewing people around the world. I was struck by interviewees in places like Egypt and Venezuela expecting that if Obama actually tries to govern, he'll be stymied or possibly even killed by "them," some shadowy force that actually runs the country. I know why they're assuming this; it's because that's how it works in most of the world. "They" might do all sorts of things for display, but "they" keep a permanent grip on power.

I suspect that over the next six months, the world is going to change just because of that one thing. Because in most of the world, people look at America and assume that it works just like their countries; that ultimately, everything is run by corruption. And they're going to see that no, Obama really is in control, and really does run the country -- which means that all of their beliefs and hypotheses about how everything bad is inevitable are going to run up very visibly against reality.

And I suspect that al-Qaeda's recruiting is going to fall through the floor, because suddenly the old spiel about how America is the great Satan and is really secretly plotting against you just doesn't ring as true when the president's middle name is Hussein and his skin is darker than yours.




And most of all, what I'm thinking about tonight is Martin Luther King's last speech, when he said that though he may not get there with us, our country will reach the promised land.

You know what's the most amazing thing of all about that speech, for someone who has one foot in this country and one foot in another? It's that that speech was one generation ago. In one generation, we've gone from lynchings and civil rights marches to a black man being elected as president. Ultimately, there seemed to be more fooforaw about Obama's race in the media than there was among the public; Americans, especially younger Americans, seemed to think that it was just a normal thing. In one generation, the country changed what it believed because it was genuinely convinced.

If this doesn't shake you deeply, you don't know what this is like everywhere else.

In Israel, the same time ago takes us to the Six-Day War. Twice that distance takes us to the Holocaust, and ten times that distance to various pogroms. And those things might as well have happened yesterday; everyone is still as rawly aware of them as they are of things that happened last year.

In Europe, in the Middle East, in all of the world, things simply don't change on the scale of a generation, not without an enormously bloody war.

But in America, they do. Because ultimately, when all is said and done, we actually believe in what we preach.

That democracy is the best way to run a government, and elections should be free and fair. That people should be able to rise to the level of their ability, not just on the basis of their contacts and their power. That, ultimately, we are a single nation, no matter what we look like or disagree about.

My God. I still can't type these things without crying.

Yes, we can, America. We just did.

ברוך אתה יי, אלוהינו מלך העולם, שהחיינו, וקיימנו, והגיענו לזמן הזה.

Where I work, I'm considered fairly senior. I've got a good deal of experience, and people generally respect my opinion.

This has had an important consequence which I didn't expect. I have the power to make people feel good about themselves professionally. For example, when someone comes to me with a design - especially if they're feeling insecure about it, especially if they're fairly new or junior and are nervous about coming forward with it - by getting excited about their work and encouraging them, I can lead them in turn to be excited about their own work.

One of the wonderful things about this is that it doesn't require that their design be excellent in order to work. Even if the design is deeply flawed, the conversation that results will reveal the ideas which led to it, and will encourage them to think more about it, and by the end of it they wil have something that they're excited about.

Another one is that oddly enough, this seems to work for good but not for evil. Having a senior person - one you respect but don't necessarily know personally - praise your work has a much more positive impact, overall, than having the same person deride it would have a negative impact. Not that I would want to do that, but it's very pleasing to me to think that there is a benefit which can come in life from a form of power which isn't immediately translatable into its opposite.

There wasn't any particular recent event that inspired this post. It just occurred to me that at various times in the past, I've spoken with people who were unsure about their work, and when they left they clearly felt really good about it; and those have been some of my favorite moments.

Working with people is neat.

(FYI: The following entry is going to be much more technical than most of what I post. Anyone who doesn't care about code or data serialization can pretty much hit "next" right now.)

A few days ago, Google open sourced one of its key data serialization formats, protocol buffers. There's already been some chat on how they're similar to or different than other wire formats, but I thought it would be useful to post some useful tips I've come across over the years about how to make them do useful things.

Don't expect any deep insights into computer science here, just a few notes about working with these libraries.
( Read more... )

The day's primaries in Indiana and North Carolina are drawing to a close. In the large scheme of things, these probably aren't going to shift the course of history; but the things I've been hearing all day today have made me angry, much angrier - and much sadder - than anything I've seen in the United States in a while. (And God knows, there has been plenty of competition.)

It started with the legal fracas (which started over the past week) over people tied to the Clinton campaign making fraudulent robocalls to black voters to falsely convince them that they weren't registered to vote. I was willing to wait to see if this was isolated, but...

samtheeagle has been working for the Obama campaign in Indiana today, with a sharp focus on making sure people who can legally vote can actually do so. Take a look at his posts from today: 5:52 AM 7:55 AM 9:40 AM 11 AM 12:30 PM 8 PM. I should say that this is not a random poll worker; this is an attorney with an extraordinary record of public service and devotion to democracy. He is someone whose opinion on elections I take seriously. And I've heard similar things from other channels.

If this is really what happened -- Clinton campaign workers systematically attempting to prevent voters that they see as likely to vote against them, attempting to prevent black voters from voting -- then I think that this campaign has crossed a certain line which I didn't expect that anyone on this side of the aisle would cross. It would represent a deliberate attempt to interfere with the basic operation of democracy for personal gain.

(NB: I didn't say that Clinton personally authorized this, and I seriously doubt that she did. But something doesn't happen on this wide a scale, in a state so closely watched by the candidate, without at least being tacitly condoned from the top. With something this serious, it doesn't really matter; the simple act of having created an environment within a campaign where such a thing would be considered acceptable by field workers on a large scale is, in my eyes, a sign of a deep and pervasive moral failure of the people at the top. If it was with an actual explicit OK, which is unlikely, it would be such a reprehensible act that it doesn't even bear mentioning)

Why does this make me so angry? I know this isn't exactly unique in American history. But the scale of hypocrisy that would be required to do such a thing while preaching to the Democratic choir, while waving the flag of Bill Clinton's "blackness," and the simple fact that a Democrat would be willing to do this even in a party primary, seems to make what would ordinarily be a contemptible action far worse.

I think this is also why I find it worse than watching Middle Eastern politics. I don't expect a Syrian election to be even vaguely legitimate. I expect the US to try to create a gold standard of how democracies are run.

So. I'm going to wait a while longer, to see if this is confirmed by further sources over the next few weeks. If (God forbid) this checks out, and Clinton does win the nomination, then I don't think that I will be able to support her in the general election. Not that I'm likely to vote for McCain, whose policies I think would drag the country even further into the abyss¹; but I may simply abstain from the presidential election.

¹ Under the Bush administration, our country was led to the brink of an abyss; but under a McCain administration, we would take a great leap forward.

Based on the current best measurements of the large-scale structure of the universe, 73% of the total mass-energy is cosmological constant, a.k.a. dark energy; of the remainder, 90% is dark matter of various sorts. The remainder is 90% intergalactic gas, and the rest luminous matter.

For short: 97% of the universe is poorly understood; 3% is hot air; and the rest is on fire.

Any resemblance to other projects is purely coincidental, I promise.

Now, this is neat: A superheavy element (Z=122, A=292, tentatively named "eka-Thorium" or "unbibium") which is relatively stable (t_1/2 ≥ 10⁸ yr) has been observed in nature, in natural Thorium samples. (It's called eka-Thorium because it would sit directly below Thorium on the periodic table; as a result, it's chemically very similar to Thorium, which means it can mix in to Thorium ores and stick there because it doesn't separate very easily)

This is a whole 30 atomic numbers above the next-largest naturally occurring element, Uranium. (Z=92, A=238) It's the first empirical proof that superheavy nuclei can actually exist and be stable.

Edit: Some history - the last time an element was discovered in nature was Francium (Z=87), which was discovered in 1939 by Marguerite Perey. It was thought highly likely that that would be the last time anyone ever did.

On 6 Sep 2007, Israel bombed the hell out of a facility in Syria which, rumor has it, was nuclear in nature. Today the CIA gave a presentation to Congress showing the detailed evidence, which the Washington Post has kindly presented here.

Some conclusions from looking at this, and being generally familiar with nuclear equipment. This is very, very different from the rather dubious WMD intel used in Iraq; rather than fuzzy satellite photos, someone appears to have been able to walk around and inside the building during its construction with a camera and take pretty clear pictures, which can then be compared in detail with some very good-quality satellite photos.¹

Assuming that the pictures are real, they are a smoking gun.² This building was a nuclear reactor; it was of a type that can be used to produce Plutonium for nuclear weapons, but is utterly useless for any research or power generation purpose;³ it appears to be a slightly smaller⁴ carbon copy of the North Korean Plutonium production reactor at Yongbyon; it was in a shape that could probably be started up within weeks when it was destroyed; there is clear and repeated evidence of extensive NORK involvement in its design, construction, and operation.

Now, a more interesting question. This reactor was obviously very close to startup, which means they had to have nuclear fuel lying around somewhere in fairly large volumes. (There's no evidence at all that Syria was working on the ability to enrich Uranium on their own, as Iran is) I'm guessing that the bombing didn't hit a large fuel storage area, since everyone else would have noticed clouds of radioactive soot and dust and generally been a lot more worried. Presumably this fuel came from some combination of North Korea, Russia and Pakistan. (Those being the three people with fuel who would even remotely consider doing business with Syria)

So... where is it?

Presumably Syria's next move is to try to build again, this time deep underground. NORK nuke people were on-site within days of the original attack, probably to do damage assessment; my guess is that they would tell al-Assad that this is what he gets for trying to build on the cheap in the desert, and if he really wants to protect his sites he'll invest in their better-concealed designs. This is going to lead to something a lot harder to find and destroy. The main things which would prevent that is if the Syrians started to run low on money, or if the government suddenly found itself with enough bigger problems on its hands that extremely expensive construction projects became less enticing.

(Slightly NSFW, but this is a reputable newspaper)

Apparently HM Treasury really is run by a wunch of bankers. Who, it must be said, can treat their situation with good humor:

“It is true that it caused a few titters among some staff when viewed on its side, but on consideration we concluded that the effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters OGC - and it is not inappropriate to an organisation that’s looking to have a firm grip on Government spend.”

According to Jimmy Carter, Hamas is ready for peace -- if Israel withdraws to its 1967 boundaries (i.e., cedes all of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan, and half of Jerusalem) immediately, it will agree to a ten-year cease-fire.

Translation: "If you accede to our demands right now, we won't attack you¹ for the next ten years."

My suggested answer: "Cus 'emac.²"

¹ Of course, we reserve the right to arrange for other groups to attack you, or to transfer our weapons to other groups.

² When one of my officemates asked what that phrase meant, someone else walking by translated: "Well, the second word means 'your mother.'"

A very interesting US civics quiz. Difficult, and fun.

You answered 55 out of 60 correctly — 91.67 %
Average score for this quiz during April: 66.8%
Average score since September 18, 2007: 66.8%

My former boss just published a great little article about things you need to know when building a search engine. It's chock-full of some really excellent advice for anyone building any large-scale computer system. For example:

Ah, but SCSIs are hot-swappable, you say. Get over it. Remember, no colo. You cannot afford it and you don't want it. So if you're worried about disk failures since you picked your disks out of a Dumpster, then my advice is don't screw the covers onto your machines and don't use four screws per disk. This makes IDEs pretty easy to repair, but certainly not hot-swappable.

Edward Lorenz, meteorologist and founder of chaos theory, passed away today at the age of 90. He discovered the chaotic properties of nonlinear systems as a result of an unexpected result while running numerical weather simulations in 1961, and changed the way we think about complex systems.

For those of you with a mathematical background, I recommend taking a look at his 1963 paper "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow," in which he proves one of the most basic results of chaotic dynamics (that nonperiodic flows are unstable against small perturbations), applies it to a simple problem in fluid dynamics, demonstrates vividly and in pictures the way that the system becomes unpredictable, and reflects on its significance for weather prediction. It seems a fitting way to mark his passing, and the paper is great; very straightforward¹ and well-written, and full of the best pictures that 1963-era computing could produce.

¹ By comparison to most technical papers in mathematics, that is, and especially to most papers on differential equations. I realize that this is not the best definition of "straightforward."

The Leningrad Cowboys and the Red Army Choir singing "Sweet Home Alabama."

At tonight's Clinton-Obama debate, one of the hosts asked an almost inevitable question about Clinton's "day one" rhetoric: "What would you do differently on day one than a President Obama would when it comes to managing the nation's economy?" After both candidates answered, it was hard to avoid the impression that the real answer is "not much;" they both had fairly similar plans. And this was the case with a lot of what they said tonight; the policy differences between the two candidates seem relatively minimal, and I suspect that a lot of the places where they do differ are the sorts of things that would change after the election. (I wouldn't be surprised if Obama's health plan ended up taking on more aspects of Edwards' as it got prepared; and I would be surprised if Clinton would really freeze the prime interest rate for five years, as she promised to do tonight.¹)

But this made me realize where I think the biggest difference between the two candidates is: Not on day one of a presidency, but on day sixty.

If a new president were to start to push the sorts of policies that both candidates have endorsed, about health care, the economy, or Iraq, they would start to run into serious resistance. Within two months, some very powerful interests would have marshalled considerable forces to oppose those changes. And on that day, what really matters is whether the president has the ideological leadership of the country; can he or she go out in public, make the case that This Is What We Need To Do, and cause people to form up behind the idea?

Simply having a sheaf of policy proposals, no matter how well-designed, is not enough. The power of the president isn't in the passing of laws; it's in the bully pulpit, in the power to set the policy direction of the country and rally the citizenry to do what needs to be done. Bill Clinton knew how to do that. Ronald Reagan did, too. Obama has often been compared to JFK, and I think the comparison is somewhat apt; he may lack experience, but experience has been a poor predictor of presidential success. But Hillary Clinton? After half a year of campaigning, I still don't know what her grand vision is. From hearing her response and Obama's to the question of meeting with Raúl Castro, I would almost think it was "cautiousness." As she's fond of saying, she has been tested before against strong Republican opposition -- but she failed. Her health care plan went down in flames because she didn't unify anyone behind it, and I haven't seen any evidence that she's gotten better at that. Plus, of course, there is a significant field of Republicans who would consider it their first responsibility to stymie anything Hillary Clinton does as a matter of principle; AFAIK, few feel similarly strongly against Obama.

So what I would foresee from a Clinton presidency is a mess. A lot of exciting proposals coming out on the first day, lots of big, thick bills going into the legislature, lots of lobbyists showing up, lots of sneaky ads and negative campaigns running around in the media, and ultimately her being forced to back down. Followed by four years of not being very effective, because the Democrats in Congress can't get their act together enough to pass things even when they are in the majority unless they have a strong leader, and very likely a Republican president in 2012.

I don't know what would happen from an Obama presidency, but it's less likely to be that. Faced with a Day Sixty challenge, I expect that he would have been out there in front of the country for the entire time prior to that, forcefully making his case for reforms; the negative campaign is far less likely to even start, much less gain serious traction, if the people making it realize that public opinion is strongly against them to begin with. I don't know if his policies would be as good in their details, but they would have a chance to pass.

So this past primary, I voted for Obama. I support his campaign and think he would make a genuinely better leader for this country than Hillary Clinton, a better leader than John McCain.

I don't want a president with nothing more than policy papers; I want one who can help restore our vision of America as a country worthy of emulation.

( One more thing... )

¹ At least, I sincerely hope she wouldn't.

A fascinating little clip, courtesy of Warren Ellis' blog, of a video from Westboro Baptist Church. (The "God Hates Fags" crew) They got together to sing a song called "God Hates The World," to the tune of "We Are The World." It's morbidly fascinating - you don't get to see real, unabashed dystheism in the world very often. They aren't even preaching "repent or else;" the message is very clear, God hates you and everybody else, nothing you can do will change it, he's going to burn everyone in Hell.

It's sort of like seeing the cultists of the Elder Gods from H. P. Lovecraft come to life; their god is going to wake up and destroy the world, but presumably they're still worshipping him so that they'll be eaten last?

Ah, Mike Huckabee. Favored candidate in Iowa because, as far as I can tell, nobody's listened to him enough to realize why he's a nut job. Here's his Iowa campaign manager, Bob van der Plaats, explaining why he's qualified to handle foreign policy -- because he's "a man who understands the theological nature of this war."