Gray Watson's Blog -- August 2006

Blogging is a useful way for me to record my thoughts and digital travels every so often. Hope you enjoy my digital stream of consciousness.

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August 28, 2006

Another good piece by George Monbiot, this time about the dominiation of Israel's politics by war hawks. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.
But you cannot read any account of Israeli politics without being struck by the extraordinary domination of the generals. We are familiar with military dictatorships. But Israel is unique in being a military democracy(5). An electoral system much fairer than our own repeatedly places the country in the hands of warriors, and sometimes (I am thinking of Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon) war criminals(6). Even when civilians are elected, they are pushed around by the generals. To sustain their position, the warrior chiefs seek to ensure that Israel is constantly on the verge of war.
So a planecrash yesterday down in Lexington Kentucky was tragic to say the least. My officemate showed me this description of the KLEX airport. You notice in the diagram on the right hand side, that if the pilot left the terminal heading northeast and then took the 1st left instead of the 2nd, he would be on the short runway. Ground is supposed to hold the plane at the end of the runway and verify that they are on the right one before telling them to roll. Ugh. Other sources of news story: BBC, CNN, ABC.

August 25, 2006

Here's an absolutely fabulous article by Bruce Schneier about how we are helping the terrorists by being terrorized. I've hinted this before but he is much more eloquent than I. Other sources: Bruce' blog.
I'd like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.
The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.
And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.

August 23, 2006

So doing some surfing this evening, I came across this dude who hacked up a bicycle wheel LED display. Pretty cool. I was more interested in how he did his own boards and his source for parts. I was also looking at the Mattel Juice Box hacking by loading eLinux on it. Another attach by the penguinistas.
Here's a cool site which sells fun surplus science stuff. Some things that caught my eye:
- Sheets of silver mylar film -- US$1.25 for 20' x 18" roll
- Solar hot air balloon / ultra-lightweight 9' long black plastic tube -- US$4 each
- Peltier Heat Pump for US$18
Couple of funny pieces from the Onion caught my eye this morning. First was War-Torn Middle East Seeks Solace In Religion.
"I take solace in knowing that my faith is a sanctuary, an escape from the bloodshed and turmoil," said Haifa resident Yigal Taheri, who last week lost his wife and newborn daughter when a Fajr-3 long-range rocket launched by Lebanese militants struck the synagogue where his family was attending services. "YHWH, Elohim, whatever you wish to not call HimHis love comforts all those who are willing to open their hearts to Him. Praise be to Gd."
The next article that is a must read is Prohibitively High Rocket-Fuel Prices Bring Mideast Crisis To Standstill.
"The way things are going, I wont have any money left over for other necessities, such as anti-aircraft missiles, land mines, and machine guns," said Hezbollah guerrilla Mahmoud Hamoui, who is just one of hundreds of Islamic militants compelled to scale back their killing until rocket-fuel prices return to their pre-2006 levels.

August 17, 2006

A federal judge in Detroit has rules that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional. Good news for a change. Here is a local copy of the ruling. Other sources: CBS news, CNN, CNET, ACLU.
The Government appears to argue here that, pursuant to the penumbra of Constitutional language in Article II, and particularly because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself.
We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all inherent powers must derive from that Constitution.

August 15, 2006

So I've heard talk about solar shingles but never seen the actual product. Here's a cool picture essay of a home installation with them. Here's a company which sells solar shingles and some more details about solar shingles. It would be cool if zoning required that some portion of new house roofs had solar shingles.

August 11, 2006

So I've been meaning to blog an entry about Bush's signing statements. Bush has used signing statements to raise constitutional objections to over 800 provisions in over 100 laws. All of the presidents before him had issued only 600 and many of the statements were more interpretation of the law, not disregarding. I consider it a direct afront to the constitution and a continuation of the expansion of executive powers under the Bush administration. Instead of vetoing legislation and giving Congress the opportunity to debate and attempt an override, Bush has basically said that he will not abide by certain previsions in laws -- in effect saying that the executive branch is above the law when it deems it necessary.
Recently a bipartisan 11 member panel of the American Bar Association ruled that these signing statements were unconstitutional. It turns out that Senator Specter is supposedly working on a bill which will let Congress sue the president to allow the Supreme Court to rule on signing statements. I'm pessimistic that it will ever come to be given that party politics seems to trump all else these days -- including constitutional checks and balances. If this was a Democratic president, I'd like to believe that the Republicans would have acted long ago. I can only hope that political conservatives are as appalled by this as I am.
For more information about the topic: On Point radio discussion, Washington Post, CBS News, Lou Dobbs commentary.

August 10, 2006

So I was looking today at the CNN home page and I'm now determined to never go there again. Mostly all they were covering was the terrorist threat from London:
- THE 'EXPLOSIVE COCKTAIL'
- 'Mass murder' intended
- Bush: U.S. at war with 'Islamic fascists'
- New York Airports Alert
Then I went to the BBC News page and the NPR News page which had a section of coverage about it but much less of their pages dedicated to what basically amounts to scare tactics. Hmmmm. Isn't the role of the terrorist, uhhhh, terror? When does CNN's coverage actually accomplish the goal of the enemy? The federal administration and the news media have done much to improve the brand awareness of Al Qaeda. A reporter today was talking about how this looked like one of there actions because of the CNN factor -- another example of how media exposure is a specific goal of terrorist groups. It helps them raise money and get respect.

August 4, 2006

Cool collection of aircraft videos from Dryden Flight Research Center. It includes videos of the shuttle/747, UAV craft, wingtip vortex tests, controlled impacts, human powered aircraft, solar-powered aircraft (Helios), and many others.
A couple officemates and I were having fun talking about hoaxes. One mentioned ear candling which sounds like some sex act but is actually a process of cleansing the brain by poring hot wax into your ear. I then brought up Entropy Systems which has raised money to develop an engine that ran off of the heat of the universe and gave off cool air. Even wired.com covered the press release as the Little Engine that Might and Miracle Engine's Tank Is Empty. Amit Sanjay actually has some patents including device and method for thermal transfer using air as the working medium and device for thermal transfer using air as the working medium. Unfortunately for his investors, patents don't have to document something that works.
So I've been hearing and believing that the Iraq war mess is getting more and more similar to the Vietnam quagmire. Although there are certainly important differences between the wars, but our lack of firm purpose, our unrealistic expectations of success, that we are there for the wrong reasons, and the overall death spiral feeling of Operation Iraqi Freedom are ringing bells. The NY Times editorial from today commented on how Rumsfeld is out of touch and mentions the Vietnam metaphor. It was suggested that we couldn't leave Vietnam because Communist forces would claim victory and gain the upper-hand around the globe. Riiiight. But Rumsfeld sounds exactly like this as he said yesterday to the Senate Arms Service Committee:
"If we left Iraq prematurely", he said, "the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they'd order us and all those who dont share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines. And finally", he intoned, "America will be forced to make a stand nearer home".
No one in charge of American foreign affairs has talked like that in decades. After Vietnam, of course, the communist empire did not swarm all over Asia as predicted; it tottered and collapsed. And the new enemy that Mr. Rumsfeld is worried about is not a worldwide conspiracy but a collection of disparate political and religious groups, now united mainly by American action in Iraq.
Google is publishing some of its research into n-gram models. They are publishing 6 DVDs with the information. Very cool.
We believe that the entire research community can benefit from access to such massive amounts of data. It will advance the state of the art, it will focus research in the promising direction of large-scale, data-driven approaches, and it will allow all research groups, no matter how large or small their computing resources, to play together. That's why we decided to share this enormous dataset with everyone. We processed 1,011,582,453,213 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,146,580,664 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,653,070 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times.

August 3, 2006

Top US Generals from Iraq have indicated that the fighting there could move into civil war. Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of United States forces in the Middle East and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both gave sobering assessments to the Senate Armed Services Committee. This comes as the Pentagon lengthened the stays of current divisions and increased American involvement to 135,000 troops. Lovely. Wonder how the administration is going to spin it. Other sources: ABC news, Washington Post, BBC News.
But the tone of the hearing, coinciding as it did with the continuing carnage in Iraq and the Israeli conflict with the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, was not one of optimism. Nothing in the testimony of the commanders, or in that of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, pointed to an early withdrawal of United States forces.
"We can persevere in Iraq, or we can withdraw prematurely, until they force us to make a stand nearer home", said Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing before the panel after sharp criticism of his earlier intention not to go to Capitol Hill. "But make no mistake: they're not going to give up whether we acquiesce in their immediate demands or not".

August 2, 2006

Excellent article about the current state of the Middle East and how Bush is the "King of Fiaryland". The fact that we are not looking at the true motivations in this war is terrible. The hard liners on both sides (neocons versus terrorists) are in effect creating a self fulfilling shitstorm. Authoritarian actions fuel the fires of terrorism -- terrorism encourages an increase in authoritarian actions. Both sides can point to the actions of the other to support their cause for death and destruction.
At his press conference with Tony Blair on Friday, George Bush laid out his usual fairytale about the conflict in the Middle East. "There's a lot of suffering in Lebanon", he explained, "because Hezbollah attacked Israel. Theres a lot of suffering in the Palestinian Territory because militant Hamas is trying to stop the advance of democracy. There is suffering in Iraq because terrorists are trying to spread sectarian violence and stop the spread of democracy."(17) The current conflict in Lebanon "started, out of the blue, with two Israeli soldiers kidnapped and rockets being fired across the border."

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