A new penguin-bapping game. This one is essentially indirect-fire penguin darts. It involves a yeti and an orca.

One of my favorite Jack Chick tracts. (For those of you not familiar with these, they're... shall we say... very Christian little pamphlets that evangelists hand out on street corners. This one in particular is about evolution, and why it's obviously incorrect and against all religious law)

According to this tract, quantum chromodynamics is a lie, gluons do not exist, and strongly interacting particles are held together by the direct force of divine intervention. (Which is, apparently, somehow distinguishable from gluons. Maybe it has different scattering properties or something.)

That's going to be a very busy personal divinity. There are a lot of baryons in this universe.

I think I'm going to have to start using the phrase "As busy as the Holy Ghost during baryogenesis."

A previous post discussed the general notion of civil law and why I believe it to be the foundation of the American legal system and a general good thing. I'd like now to continue with a series of posts in the next few days trying to apply this principle directly to some contentious issues today.
( Subject 1: Gay marriageCollapse )
The next post will discuss a much more complicated issue: abortion. (And this one is going to take a while to write, so it won't be anytime soon!)

In the past few months, I've heard the issue of gay marriage being debated on a number of fronts, like "civil rights," "the sanctity of the institution," and so on. But on thinking about it, I've realized that there's a separate issue involved: The existence of civil law. Since this seems to have implications substantially beyond this one issue, I thought I'd put some notes about it here.

This first part is of a general nature: It's about the whole idea of civil law and why it's important. Part 2 will talk about the applications of this idea to specific political issues.
( Read more...Collapse )

Spectrometry can be fun. (This is Sodium)

Mattel has specifically but somewhat unfirmly denied that the much-discussed breakup of Ken and Barbie has anything to do with the new "Cali girl Barbie" that was recently introduced.

This took a whole different spin in my head when I saw a print ad for the latter in a local paper, and noticed that when printed on low-grade newsprint, a lower-case i looks an awful lot like an l.

So Focus on the Family, a political group headquartered out of Colorado Springs, has issued a statement about the recent South Korean research on stem cells, describing it as "nothing short of cannibalism." (news story)

(1) I am, once again, embarassed to be from the same state as these idiots.

(2) It's a fscking blastocyst. The South Korean group has found a way to manufacture a large volume of cells from any donor starting from cells from that donor. It uses a denucleated egg cell from another donor as a component. I fail to see the moral difference between this and taking a skin scraping and culturing it in a petri dish.

(3) "Nothing short of cannibalism" sounds like an excellent motto.

This is war! The battle between the sexes! Anything short of cannibalism is just beating around the bush!

Date:	2004-02-11 01:17
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	thoughtful

A person who lacks the means, within himself, to live a good and happy life will find any period of his existence wearisome.

Date:	2004-02-11 00:41
Subject:	Film
Security:	Public
Mood:	thoughtful

I just finished watching "Smoke." It's a good film, kind of a hard one to explain - just a story about people who hang out in a smokeshop, really, but who they are, what's happened to them, where they're going... for a short summary, it's got Harvey Keitel playing the owner of the shop, and ends with music by Tom Waits. And can pull the latter off without bullshit, which is not as easy as it sounds.

Actually, I signed up for netflix a few weeks ago - after suggestions by quite a few of my friends that I ought to - and since then have been watching quite a few more movies than I normally do. It makes some sense, really; when you come home late from work, it's too late to call anyone up or to do anything like playing the piano, it can be a good way to spend some time. And it's been a chance to explore through what's out there in film, which I'm realizing I haven't spent nearly enough time doing. There's a whole literature out there just waiting.

(Some of the highlights from the past few days - Smoke, Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, and Roman Holiday. All well worth the time.)

Anyway, I'm starting to scan through good film for things to watch. Anyone have any suggestions? Films you think everyone ought to see at least once?

Incidentally, Cabbala isn't the biggest thing on my mind tonight. There's a new paper out on the archive (here) which I suspect is on the tail of something very, very important. I think that Bousso's approach to holography has something very "right" about it, and this paper may be one of the first hints of exactly which way this needs to go.

Date:	2004-02-09 01:29
Subject:	Word games (Cabbala)
Security:	Public
Mood:	thoughtful

I've been reading through a book by Zetter on the Cabbala, which is overall nothing stunning but has some interesting insights. And some of these got me thinking, so I'm just going to muse here....

Please be warned that at some stage in this I'm going to descend into alphabetic analysis, which should not be taken too seriously. It's a way to get at ideas more directly, but the ideas are the goal and the alphabet is just a rather odd means to get there.

Also, please note that it's late, and I'm really not thinking in English at the moment, so the following may be really incomprehensible at times, and is probably not of interest to anyone who doesn't do these things for fun. So be warned!

( Read more...Collapse )

I don't know why this isn't being mentioned a bit more in the American press, but there's an uprising going on in Haiti. Given that this is only a few hundred miles from Florida, and that refugees and other interesting political problems are quite capable of seeping over that distance, you would think people would be a bit more interested...

President Bush was interviewed for the first time since taking office several years ago. The shifting sands of rationale continue to move, now back to the assertion that we needed to invade because Saddam Hussein was "dangerous." (Please don't take this amiss - remember that this reason was cited before WMD were cited. They didn't come up as a reason until the beginning of the campaign to sell the war to NATO and the UN, around last September.)

One of his statements (cf. this article) did surprise me a bit - "[The weapons of mass destruction] could have been destroyed during the war." If it were that damned easy to destroy them, they wouldn't be so high a risk - the only way to bulk get rid of nonconventional weapons is to set them off. More interesting is the suggestion that some stockpile may have been "transported to another country."

I suspect that there may have been something - not very much, but enough to be worth moving into the Syrian desert. Not enough for the WMD rationale to really be defensible, but enough to make me wonder what's going to happen to any such weapons that may be lying around....

On 4 Feb, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force got a judge to issue a subpoena to Drake University in Iowa for all records associated with an anti-war protest held there on 15 Nov. (story, stora) The subpoena, issued under seal by US District Judge Longstaff, includes specific requests for all records regarding the protest leaders.

According to attornies from the National Lawyer's Guild and the ACLU, this is the first such subpoena in several decades. (As a side note: These subpoenas were especially common during the 1960s, and were a particular favorite even before then of J. Edgar Hoover. Their primary purpose then was to assemble dossiers against political subversives and enemies of various administrations.)

The seriousness of this matter is, I hope, clear. The issuing of subpoenas of any sort, even for purely "informational purposes," against demonstrators is designed and intended to have a chilling effect on speech; it is a specific act of the Justice Department to subdue ordinary political dissent. The subpoena has been challenged in court and hopefully will not stand.

In another matter, there was this story about investigations within the DoD. I can't even begin to explain how furious this makes me. If any of these allegations are substantiated, these are matters for general courts-martial and the penalties which only they can provide; it brings into question the performance of the entire chain of command in any place where it happened, and of who allowed a circumstance to arise in which such a thing could even be conceivable. I only hope that all levels involved in this understand just how serious a matter this is.

( Thoughts on the ballot measures, Part 2: Propositions 57 and 58Collapse )

Well, I received my copy of the official summary of ballot measures for the upcoming statewide election (March 2nd - those of you in the state, make sure you're registered!) and read through them. And much to my surprise, I may end up voting a somewhat different pattern than usual. Here are my current thoughts on all four upcoming statewide measures; I'm splitting them into two posts because of length.
( Thoughts on the ballot measures, Part 1: Propositions 55 and 56Collapse )

From Barron's Law Dictionary, 5th edition:

Crime of Passion: ... For instance, a man's attack on another person with an axe after that person insulted the attacker's wife might be considered a crime committed in the heat of passion.

One third of the Iranian parliament has just resigned. This comes in protest of the Guardian Council's decision to ban over half the candidates for parliament for standing for office, including a large number of incumbents. The move comes after a three-week sit-in which the current parliament held in protest.

The situation is heating up; whether this will be the thing that triggers a large-scale change remains to be seen. Best of luck to the reformers.

The userpic is a bit more appropriate than usual in this case. It's a report about a CIA operation back in the early 80s to deal with how the Soviets were "acquiring" US technology secretly. If this is indeed the case, and I have no reason to believe otherwise, I must say that this was simply beautiful. The story, by William Safire, here.

So Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, has signed a detailed confession about how he provided a great deal of nuclear how-to, including lots of details, to Iran, Libya and North Korea. (NY Times story here)

President Musharraf is of course shocked, shocked! to find out that this was going on.

The American and Pakistani statements, of course, put the blame squarely on Khan, and not on any members of the government, since we've found ourselves in the unenviable position of needing Musharraf to stay alive and in power since he's far and away the best of several options for the rulership of Pakistan. (For one, he's somewhat opposed to the fundamentalists, despite the fact that they control the army and de facto a good fraction of the country.) Unfortunately, quite a few of his countrymen disagree with that last estimation, or at least so it would seem given the number of people who have tried to kill him in the past few months.

So is anyone at all surprised by any of this?

Just finished Keegan's Intelligence in War. Despite the issue in my prior post, I think this is a remarkably well-written and well-thought-out book. I recommend it to anyone interested in the role that intelligence has played in military operations in the past few centuries. (It covers from Napoleon to the second Gulf War)

But incidentally to the main thread of its discussion, reading this book drove home the extent to which our present situation (with regards to hazy terror groups, not Iraq) is different from what our military has been designed to handle. Even Keegan states that "no smaller power has ever won a protracted war with a larger one" - by which I assume he was thinking only of traditional, symmetric wars.

It makes me very curious about the entire subject of the structure of informal networks such as al Qaeda, and how they may be most effectively monitored and interdicted. I've got some preliminary thoughts, but there's a very basic missing piece in my trying to think about this.

An organization like al Qaeda can be thought of as a large network of people. What, precisely, is it that propagates along this network? Do specific commands propagate? Does information propagate upwards as well as downwards? What about materiel, raw resources like money, training data? How are expert proficiencies handled - are people already in situ trained at something, or are specialists moved into position by central planning?

I think a lot of these questions are answerable without access to classified information, and a bit of thinking about these issues could lead to some very interesting structural models that could provide useful information about how to destroy these groups irretrievably.

So the founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, A. Q. Khan, was just fired from his post as a high-ranking adviser and placed under house arrest amidst increasing evidence that he was personally involved in the sale of nuclear technology to a number of fairly dubious states, such as Iran and Libya. ("Increasing evidence" such as "his sales brochure with his picture on the cover")

As a side note, Khan is revered as a hero in Pakistan for being the person to give his country the bomb (mostly by stealing the techniques from Germany, but that's neither here nor there), and this is part of Pres. Musharraf's attempt to bring various radical elements under control, including another directive issued a few days ago to get his generals to use more aggressive means to bring terrorist elements in the Pashtun hinterlands near the Afghan border under control.

I would not sell Musharraf any life insurance right about now.

The more interesting question is, how will things unfold if/when he's gone?

This is likely not of much interest to most people, but it's something I noticed while reading a book...
( Opinions about military intelligenceCollapse )

I just finished watching Chaplin's "Modern Times." The film is better than I remembered - both very funny and deadly serious in its larger meaning.

The special features on the DVD are, however, a bit odd. There's a Ford propaganda film from 1940; there's even a karaoke version (with subtitles) of the nonsense song from the film. Yes, the subtitles are nonsense too.

I've been rewatching Cowboy Bebop lately, a bit at a time, when I have the chance. I just reached the ending again.

I've seen it once through before, and watched parts of it since here and there - but this is the first time I've rewatched it from beginning to end. It gains a lot on second viewing.

What's surprising is the seamless texture. It's much more clearly a love story - not agape but philia.

s33k3r, you should watch this sometime. I think you may enjoy it.

...every army needs, in key if unglamorous posts, men who can reason and
make lists and arrange for provisions and baggage wagons and, in general,
have an attention span greater than that of a duck.

-- Terry Pratchett, Night Watch