Mysteries

How I'm rushing through this! How much each sentence in this brief story contains. "The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I ususlly pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this little carousel, my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part -- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

-- Richard P. Feynman

Is It Frozen Yet?

Christmas is Coming

Christmas is coming,
Cthulhu's getting fat.
Please put a virgin in the Old One's vat!

If you haven't got a virgin then an Eldar Sign will do,
If you haven't got an Eldar Sign, then God help you!

Logo

Somebody at the Patent and Trademark Office is either very, very clever or very, very clueless. They have a newsletter. They did an article on "Homeland Security". No big deal; everybody wants to get into the act. But check out the logo:

This is just too appropriate. I've saved a copy of the image; It'll probably go away when some pointy-hair type at the USPTO gets a clue.

Snow Job

<BackgroundMusic cut=”Colorado” album=”National Lampoon Lemmings”/>

Just finished shoveling the cars out. I cleared the walk yesterday (as required by local laws, of the unenforced variety), so it just needed a bit of dusting off. The guy next door was doing the same thing; I remarked that we had to do the shoveling now, or the snow might melt before we get it shoveled. He got a laugh out of that. He seems like a nice guy; unfortunately, like everybody here in Suburbia, he doesn't seem to be really interested in talking to a mere neighbor.

There are advantages to being unemployed. I didn't have to drive in it. People from colder climes have trouble believing just what goes on in the Washington, DC area when it snows. Problem is, south of DC, it doesn't really snow that much, and north of DC, it snows enough for people to learn how to handle it. DC is right on the climatic boundary. Add in the problem that we have people from (quite literally!) all over the world here; each with their very own driving style. Top off with the fact that snow generally falls at 0 degrees C, and tends to turn to freezing slush immediately. Result is one all-time godawful mess.

A friend of mine had a visitor from Michigan during one of our little toy blizzards. "Step aside" says he. "Let an expert do the driving." He drove her car straight into the median. Didn't realize that the DC brand of slush is actually slipperier than ice.

The physics is simple. What makes ice slippery is the thin film of water between the ice and your foot or tire. The colder the ice, the thinner the film of water and the less slippery the whole system is. I’ve driven on snow in Maine in January; it’s a little slipperier than sand, but not much. No problem. Here, we get a mix of water and ice on the road, which is the worst of all possible worlds.

This year, we have an additional problem. Usually, before we get any significant snow, the County has come around with their big vacuum truck to pick up the leaves. Not this year! On the side streets, all that snow is sitting on top of a layer of leaves. Gonna be interesting when the snow starts to melt; problem with leaves in the street is that they block water drainage. This means that the snow melts, pools up behind the leaves, and then refreezes. Messy. Wet leaves are also seriously slippery by themselves.

There’s also the way the local news media play the snow. I think if Robert E. Lee and the Army of Virginia were suddenly reincarnated and marched on DC that it wouldn’t get as much news coverage as a few snowflakes. Some of the news shows give you useful information, like what schools and businesses are opening late or not at all; some just concentrate on showing pictures of fender-benders and the resulting traffic jams.

Snow in this area did have one good result: it helped bring down DC’s sick joke of a mayor, Marion Barry. Barry never learned the main secret of running a successful corrupt city administration, which is that people don’t care squat how much the city pays its contractors as long as the job gets done. Turns out DC was paying about three times as much per mile per year for snow removal as most places in New England, where they get real snow. And, in violation of the rule above, the snow wasn’t even getting pushed around. The contractors responsible tended to wait for the snow to melt enough so they wouldn’t have to risk actually driving in the snow they were supposed to remove. Now, this tended to be a bit of a kerfluffle every time we had a snow; what made this one different was that Soviet Premier Michael Gorbachev had been in town the previous week to talk to President Bush (no, not this President Bush. That President Bush.) There was much national media hilarity speculating on what Gorby would have thought about DC’s snow “removal”. Wasn’t long after that the FBI set up their little sting operation. (Personally, I still think it was entrapment, but a jury said “no”.)

As an aside, at one point, I worked for a Russian guy. He described how they handle snow in Moscow. Needless to say, they’re rather good at it. You can’t just push it around; if it falls in October, it’s gonna be there until April. You have to actually remove it. They have big dumpster-style trucks that pick up the snow; then it’s all trucked to a big field outside of town and dumped into a big pile. People can ski on it until May. Why don’t they pile it on the river? I dunno. Maybe it’s too heavy. Maybe the river doesn’t freeze soon enough or hard enough.

Later: A correspondant tells me that dumping that much snow in the river all at once would do Seriously Nasty Things to the local ecology. I can't see that as making that much difference to the Soviet government. A better reason might be that all that snow is seriously heavy; trying to drive a truck onto the ice and pile up snow would be seriously risky.

Colorado is, by the way, the only song I’ve seen a sign-language translator refuse to translate. American sign language is pretty salty, but Enough is Enough. Personally, I think it’s hysterically funny. Best fake John Denver I know.

And So It Begins ....

Terrorists.

We'll have to give up a little freedom, they said. A bit more of a wait at airports. No nail clippers. We have to make sure that Bad Guys won't blow up the plane (with nail clippers?) No real problem; we're only interested in Bad Guys. If you're not a Bad Guy, you have nothing to worry about. After all, we're the Good Guys.

A lot of us were profoundly uneasy at this. It's just too easy to define Bad Guys as "people I disagree with". "Trust us", says the Administration. "We'll do what's right."

Well, it's started. And who is singled out for intensive scrutiny? Rich Saudi kids (the kind who did the 9/11 hijackings)? New American converts to Islam ("no fanatic like a convert")? High level couriers (the guys who pay cash for one-way first-class tickets at the last minute)?

Nope. Elderly anti-war nuns. Left-leaning journalists. Green Party organizers. Yep. To the Administraiton, the Green Party is on the same level as Al Qaeda. Elderly war-protesting nuns are going to hijack airplanes. Yeah. Right.

Look, we all know what's going on here. The Republican Party is right and they know it. Anybody who disagrees with them is wrong, and shouldn't be allowed to confuse things. A person who is so deluded as to disagree with the Republican National Committee is capable of anything at all. Keeping them off of airplanes is just the first step ....

This could explain a lot about the 2002 elections. The way things normally go, the Democrats should have picked up strength. The Republicans get plusses for kicking over the Taliban, but most of the other things they've done have not been successes. No Osama. Afghanistan is still a mess, waiting to collapse back into the anarchy that spawned the Taliban. The crusade (I think the word is proper, here) against Saddam Hussein is offending practically everybody in the world. The economy is still in the toilet. More big companies collapsing into bankruptcy, amid accusations of fraud. Massive payoffs to Republican campaign contributers.

Yet we never heard any of this, either from journalists or from the Democrats. Perhaps some chains were yanked? What would happen to, say, ABC News if some of their key technical people suddenly had trouble getting on airplanes?

Just to make things more ominous, the 2002 elections were the first to make heavy use of computerized voting machines. These machines, hastily designed after the Florida disaster of 2000, have the interesting characteristic that they are totally audit-proof. That is, there is no assurance that what the machine spits out at the end of Election Day has any correlation at all to what voters punched into it. The Risks Digest has been chronicling problems with computerized voting, both theoretical and actual. See, for example, here, here, and here. I should note that the Risks Digest is probably the best regarded chronicler of risks to the public from computer systems in existance, and has been for well over a decade.

Most alarming (other than the utter cluelessness of the districts buying these pieces of crap) are the alleged ties between the voting machine manufacturers and organized crime.

Most we ever heard in the mainstream press was that some academic types don't like the voting machines. No details, no indication that the news types have any comprehension of either the technical or the political details.

It's gonna be fun to watch all the right-wing phony libertarians on the Net tapdance around this one.

Election

I just got back from voting. If you are eligible to vote and don't, today, you have no right to gripe about what the politicians do for the next couple of years.

They say that all politics is local, and we have a prime example of that, here in my district. The power of incumbancy in US politics is so strong that any incumbent is essentially unbeatable. The only time you get a real race is when the incumbent retires or dies. Or, in the case of Maryland's eighth district, gets her district rearranged under her.

Redistricting is one of the prime tools of political corruption in the US. Basically, the party in power gets to redraw the district lines however they want after each census. The originator of this was a guy named Eldrige Gerry. When one wag pointed out that a district that he'd drawn looked like a salamander, somebody else said "No, it's a Gerrymander". And thus was a new word born. All over the US, in every state except Iowa, you'll find districts that look like something out of a mathematical paper on fractals. Idea is that They are slightly outnumbered in each district, so that We win every race. Or that They are all in one district, so that They only win one district and are guaranteed to lose all the others.

Maryland's eighth district used to be Montgomery County, including both the close-in suburbs (liberal) and the up-county rural areas (conservative). After the redistricting, we lost a lot of the rural areas. The new district is much more heavily Democratic than before. And our incumbent Congresscritter is a Republican. She's fighting hard to keep her seat.

Connie Morella is one of the last of a dying breed, the Liberal Republican. Design a Congresscritter from the ground up, the way s/he should be, and you'd get Connie. Her staff answers letters. Local concerns get taken care of. She understands what she's doing in Congress.

Unfortunately, she's a Republican. The Republicans control the House, and may take back the Senate this year. The current Republican party is an alliance between right-wing religious bigots and rich folks who care only about their own finances. They take their tiny majority as a total mandate to do whatever they feel like. It would be nice if the Democrats could take back the House and throw a wrench into some of the more brainless policies that the Republicans have come up with ("Faith- based initiatives", Social Security privatization, massive tax breaks for rich people, huge agricultural subsidies, "Star wars").

Unfortunately, again, the Democrat running against Morella (Chris Van Hollen) is a jerk. He's a sometime state legislator, and was in office when the Lege (as Molly Ivins calls it) passed the UCTIA (Uniform Computer Transactions Information Act), which is the most egregiously anti- consumer piece of legislation imaginable. (Subject for another article). He'd of course come in as a freshman, and take several terms in the best case to get to a position of any power. (Morella is chair of the subcommittee on Science and Technology.) His campaign literature emphasizes that he's for Education and Gun Control. Sorry, but those are pretty thin issues. Show me one candidate (or one person, for that matter) who's opposed to education. Gun control is one of those "flag waving" kind of issues that everybody feels very strongly about, but doesn't know squat about. It's a topic for another essay. Far as I'm concerned, any candidate who mentions gun control, one way or the other, is a jerk who doesn't deserve consideration.

My brain insists on parsing "Van Hollen" as "Van Halen", which would certainly have made for a more interesting campaign

Ahh, well. I'm assuming that the Dems wouldn't take the house anyway, so I voted local. Morella. We'll see what happens.

Singing

She's singing.

Sounds like she's doing a guitar arrangement of "Porge Amour" from Le Nozze de Figaro (possibly the silliest opera ever written.) Before, it was "The Black Swan", from an opera called The Medium. It's one of the flat-out spookiest pieces of music I've ever heard -- think William Hope Hodgson does opera.

Now she's done a segue from "Porge Amour" to "April Come She Will".

Sometimes, I wonder why I got married. Other times, I know.

Al Qaeda to Unleash Giant Marine Iguana on NYC

Just when things start calming down, you run into a news item like this from the Washington Post. (It's credited to the New York Daily News, which may explain something).

Basically, it turns out that the FBI is spending a lot of time interviewing Abu Zubaida, the operations chief for Osama bin Laden (duh!). He is talking a lot, but seems to be actually saying very little (again, duh!). In talking about planned al Qaeda attacks, he seems to have been thinking about that famous al Qaeda operative, Godzilla. If you remember the movie, (American ripoff, not the Japanese series), they finally nail the big G on the Brooklyn Bridge, which comes out much the worse for wear. Seems like this was what Zubaida had in mind.

Now, of course, the FBI is going to continue interrogating him. Of course, he's going to try to avoid giving out any real information. From what little I know of police procedures, I suspect that they will eventually get some real information out of him, but not for a while. The question is why this extremely vague threat was turned onto a warning of "terrorist activity against New York City landmarks".

Couldn't have anything to do with the FBI revelations that some of their agents had dark suspicions about some of the hijackers, but they got sandbagged by their superiors. Couldn't have anything to do with the press starting to play the "who knew what and when" game about terrorist threats last August. Couldn't have anything to do with folks getting antsy waiting for the FBI to find more al Qaeda operatives (all of them got blown up except one? Gimme a break!)

Remember, children, according to our Attorney General, who is responsible for enforcing such things, criticizing the President is treason. Treason carries the death penalty, and we all know about Georgie Bush and the death penalty.

Later:

Sheesh! No matter how cynical I try to be, I can't keep up. The fact that the White House was using the vague terror threats to kick dirt over criticism comes from no less than Ari Fleischer, official flak for the Administration, as reported in the Washington Times. Note that the Times is about as politically-correct right wing Republican as you can get.

Required Reading

Bruce Schneier is one of the world's top experts in computer security, and, in particular, cryptography. In his latest newsletter he talks about some general security principles that are very relevant to the post-9/11 security frenzy. The article you want is the first one, "How to Think About Security"

Basically, there are five things we have to look at for any proposed new "security" procedure or doodad:

1. What problem does it solve?
2. How well does it solve the problem?
3. What new problems does it add?
4. What are the economic and social costs?
5. Given the above, is it worth the costs?

In Schneier's field of computer security, this little checklist is very common. Unfortunately, our politicians and news people haven't heard of it, to our peril.

Go read it. Now. I'll wait.