(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.
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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.

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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."

Several people have been posting, here and more broadly, about Garrett Lisi's new candidate unified theory of fields and gravity. (Even slashdot seems to have picked it up) This got encouraged by Lee Smolin, of loop quantum gravity fame, getting publicly excited about it, and it makes for great news because Lisi isn't currently a practicing physicist -- he's currently a surf bum with a PhD. The biggest problem is that this paper is wrong in some rather key ways.

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Anyway, that was really technical and is mostly for the reference of any physicists who still read this. The non-technical version is that it makes for a great news story and all, but this is the sort of idea that most high-energy physicists come up with sometime during grad school, think about for a few minutes, and then realize why it doesn't work.

What's more amusing is watching Lee Smolin go off and praise it, just because it's a non-string-theory theory of quantum gravity. :)

A lovely article in The Register describing a recent debate in the House of Lords about the airline liquids ban. To quote:

"We continuously monitor the effectiveness of, in particular, the liquid security measures..."

How, one might ask? But hold on:

"The fact that there has not been a serious incident involving liquid explosives indicates, I would have thought, that the measures that we have put in place so far have been very effective."

Ah, that's how. On which basis the measures against asteroid strike, alien invasion and unexplained nationwide floods of deadly boiling custard have also been remarkably effective.

There's a new exhibit at the US Holocaust Museum, which they've put up on-line. It's a collection of 116 photographs from Auschwitz, showing SS officers in their spare time, on-duty, and so on. The first 12 are the ones I find the most interesting and simultaneously unsettling; it's just photos of people having fun. Lots of them look like really nice people; the sorts of faces you would expect to see amongst your friends. Except that the men are wearing the uniforms of SS officers, the women of SS auxiliaries, even while they're playing accordions and laughing in the rain.

(There was lots of rain there. I've heard that the amount of smoke produced tended to seed clouds.)

Several of the later photos are interesting, too. #57 shows the commandant (Richard Baer), the previous commandant (Rudolf Hoess), and Josef Mengele just hanging out; this picture has a lot less of the "oh, what nice guys" aspect and a lot more of the "wow. So this is what villains look like in their spare time" aspect.

The usual sentiments about "the banality of evil" apply. The NY Times has an article and op-ed piece about the exhibit, which have some interesting bits about the provenance and significance of the photos.

So remember that case of an Israeli plane having to jettison its bombs over Syrian airspace about two weeks ago? It's been becoming clear over the past week that there was a good deal more to it. The Washington Post is now reporting as straight news (not rumor) that this was a concerted Israeli attack against a suspected Syrian nuclear site, constructed with North Korean assistance, and the attack staged after conferring with the US.

So there are quite a few pretty explosive statements in that last sentence.

(1) Syrian nuclear site -- this is the first mention of Syria trying to get the Bomb. I'm quite sure that they want it, but it wasn't at all clear that they'd made any steps towards getting one. I'm still not 100% convinced that this was really a nuke facility -- but it was some kind of extremely-high-value military target, the sort of thing that you risk a sneak attack in the dead of night for.

(2) Maybe the most interesting thing about this attack is what didn't happen. Has anyone heard any Arab government making loud warnings about the consequences of Israeli aggression? Or the Saudis arranging for broad denunciations of Israel on pan-Arabic television stations? Or for that matter, has anyone even heard the Syrians complaining about the fact that they just got bombed?

Nope. Me neither. There's been a deafening silence.

Tehran has been making some veiled threats (their assistant minister of defense making statements about how the military has contingency plans to bomb Israel if Iran is attacked), but even that's been pretty quiet.

My read on this: First of all, I appear to have grossly overestimated how well Bashar al-Assad is doing. If he's in such a weak plae that he doesn't feel that he can loudly complain and get sympathy from the Arab world, then he knows that the Arab world doesn't care if he lives or dies, and that he knows that the threat of an Israeli attack against Syria proper is very severe.

This makes some other things make more sense. For one thing, there's been this planned war. I can see how Hamas and Hezbollah would come out ahead from it - but Syria? If Syria were to try to get into a war with Israel, it would be defeated almost immediately. Its military capabilities have been deteriorating since the Soviet Union fell apart, and they weren't all that great even then. al-Assad isn't backing this war, he's trying to figure out ways to make sure it happens way the hell away from him.

It also means that a coup against al-Assad is still a very real possibility. He's never been popular at home. (Nor was his father, really. Not a nice fellow.) His habit of establishing Syrian influence in Lebanon by assassinating opposing politicians (another one was killed in a car bomb just last week) makes neighboring countries nervous. And frankly, trying to build a nuclear facility (or anything else similarly likely to bring down unpleasant foreign interest) in that area is just plain stupid -- the western Islamic world is trying to get the situation to calm down, so that they can try to contain Iran, and doing something like that could trigger another massive military "event" in the region. Or even worse, he could actually get the Bomb, and start to lord it over other Arab states, which they frankly would like a lot less than Israel doing the same. At least they know that Israel isn't going to try to destabilize their regimes or take over.

Anyway, while all this is happening the situation in Gaza is continuing to get tenser. The Israeli government has referred to the regime in Gaza as a hostile one, and the border continues to be completely closed; Gaza's economy has pretty much shut down. Hamas continues its low-level fighting with Israel.

My expectations for the immediate future: There will be further Israeli actions to shut down Hamas' military capability in Gaza, especially focused on shutting down their arms supplies via the Philadelphi Corridor. (Along the Gaza/Egypt border) Most of these operations will be secretive, but a few may be loud and public. At the same time, there's a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiation going on to try to head off a war; but several factions are trying to sieze power in Lebanon, Syria is trying to get involved in that, and there could be a coup in Syria at any time. (Or none) Both Syria and Lebanon are on the brink of civil war, and if that war gets serious enough Hezbollah is going to have too many problems at home to start exporting trouble. Israel is going to have elections soon, (probably the government will dissolve in a few months; public confidence in Olmert is extremely low) but policy probably won't change too radically no matter who is elected.

So we're looking at a period of quiet fighting and delicate manoeuvering, with a chance for localized all-out conflagrations.

I'm moving in the near future, and I have a good deal of stuff in need of a new home. Any of the stuff on this list that people don't take is going to end up in some combination of Goodwill and a dumpster, so please take any of it that you want!

I've got:

• One TV: Magnavox 29" CRT Edit: Claimed by troglodyteking


• One VCR


• One DVD player Edit: Claimed by helionaut


• An assortment of wines and liquors, some of them quite good, some of them fairly dubious. Edit: The remains are claimed by troglodyteking


• One vertical CD rack


• One set of fireplace tools


• One double cassette / radio player (boom box)


• One Sony 15" CRT monitor


• 1 small vacuum cleaner

The latest round of news about polar ice melting being a lot faster than any models have expected -- new satellite data from the ESA. What's exciting about this one is that they show that the Northwest Passage, a fabled sea route from Europe to Asia via the northern coast of Canada that would shortcut both the Panama Canal and the much longer Cape Route, which explorers searched for in vain from the 15th century to the 20th, is for the first time in recorded history navigable by sea traffic from one end to the other.

Let the gold rush begin.

Those "positive statistics" you hear from him seem to be an excellent case of how to manipulate data. Here's a nice article from the Washington Post summarizing the issue. For example, the report is touting the reduction in sectarian violence, but

Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

"So to recap. The violence numbers do not include: 1) Sunni on Sunni violence. 2) Shi'a on Shi'a violence 3) Car bombs 4) Getting shot in the front of the head."

Slight heat-up in activity in the Middle East. Apparently Syrian air defenses fired on an Israeli recon flight, forcing it to drop its bombs and fuel in an empty chunk of desert. Story just in from the wires.

Future impact unclear. The latest rumor mill I've heard is that Syria wanted to reschedule the war that was supposed to happen this past summer (which was going to be some joint Hamas / Hezbollah / Syria / logistics by Iran effort, but got scotched because Hamas and Fatah decided to have a civil war instead) for mid-November, but that sort of specific rumor has to be taken with a nontrivial grain of salt. Nonetheless, the basic schedule seems likely; all four of those groups still really want a war right about now, and it's just a matter of when is convenient.

Impact on US domestic politics, when that happens, will be an interesting question as well.

Airline sacrifices goats to appease sky god

Via gleemie, from "Jihad: The Musical!" -- just closed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival --

"I Wanna Be Like Osama"

Embattled Attorney General Resigns.

You know, I remember when Ashcroft resigned, that I wondered how exactly the administration was going to find someone worse. It didn't take too long to find out -- they hired a replacement whose biggest qualification had to do with writing memos justifying the use of torture. And this guy has really lived up to that; he's spent the past two years expanding executive power beyond what King George ever claimed, aiding and abetting the administration to evade and ignore the law, lying outright to Congress whenever not under oath, and when under oath telling things which have only the most technical relationship to the truth, and working tirelessly, day in and day out, to dismantle the Constitution and replace it with an unquestionable single-man rule.