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Questioning The War

American leaders moved swiftly yesterday to prevent the opening up of another front in the war - this time between Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, and his military chiefs. The fuss is over an article published today in the New Yorker magazine, which blames Mr Rumsfeld for many of the problems on the battlefield. It says that in the planning stages of the war, the defence secretary and his team of civilian advisers repeatedly overruled the military experts because they thought they knew better. Both Mr Rumsfeld and the war commander, General Tommy Franks, have denied the allegations - though its an open secret that Mr Rumsfelds style of management has annoyed many in the Pentagon. Meanwhile, a sign of possible dissent in the British ranks is a report this morning that three unnamed soldiers from the 16 Air Assault Brigade have been sent home to face a court martial. They are understood to have complained about the way the war is being fought and the growing danger to civilians.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/dailybriefing/story/0,12965,926333,00.html

Zipping DNA

An RGB image file, like those used by Corsetti in his analysis, is comprised of a series of data bytes. Three bytes - one red, one green and one blue - represent each pixel in the image. The numerical values of the bytes indicate the color of the pixel.When gzip compresses a file, it looks for multi-byte patterns in the data. It assigns a number to each pattern it finds and maintains a table that pairs patterns with their corresponding numbers. Each time a pattern recurs in the original file, instead of storing the pattern, the compressed file stores the number that represents the pattern. In this way, a pattern tens or even hundreds of bytes long can be represented by a number that is one, two or three bytes long. This is why the compressed file is smaller.Corsetti explains that the biogenic images are more compressible because theyre more predictable or redundant, which can be considered a form of biologic complexity.
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article415.html

Fear And Grokking On The War Crimes Trail

The money is bad, the hours are horrible and you may become very unpopular. But you get to nail the bad guy - and use your geek skills. Thats Patrick Balls life as deputy director of the Science and Human Rights Program at the AAAS. He has spent 12 years designing software that turns information on human rights abuses into databases that can be used worldwide. One of his biggest successes was in the Slobodan Milosevic trial. But there has been a personal price to pay...
http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns23881

Interesting Tactical Analysis On Iraq

The "Shock and Awe" campaign failed completely. The traditional term of "Mass" has not been used by ground forces. Air power has supplied the mass, while the ground forces have suffered from "economy of force" being redefined. The march of 3rd ID (infantry division), while amazing, has left huge supply lines from Kuwait. These supply lines do not seem to be well guarded. The Apache attack on the Medina division was largely ineffective.
http://www.dailykos.com/archives/002147.html

Decline Of The American Empire

Independent Strategy believes that the US shows many symptoms of an empire that is cresting. First, it sees deepening mistrust of the US and predicts a rise in terrorism in reaction to US unilateralism.
That is certainly the case with the Bush administration, which has made a habit of tearing up international treaties from Kyoto to the anti-ballistic missile treaty. Iraq is the culmination of the Bush administrations unilateralist streak, as the White House plunges into an unpopular war in disregard of the UN security council.
Second, Independent Strategy sees trouble ahead for US economic policy. It notes that Mr Bush has boosted discretionary government spending more than at any time since the Vietnam war. Inheriting big budgetary surpluses from the Clinton administration, the Bush White House is heading for record deficits.
True, budget deficits were probably unavoidable as a 10-year economic expansion ran out of steam. But Mr Bush is not helping matters with a $726bn (£462bn) tax cut that, even though reduced by the senate to $350bn, benefits mostly the rich and a war that will add at least $74bn to the books, and probably considerably more.
Third, what was known as the Washington consensus - free market economics and deregulation - has broken down. As Bob McKee, chief economist with Independent Strategy, notes, a populist reaction has taken hold in Latin America, while in Asia, Malaysia has gone its own way economically. Moreover, South Korea and Taiwan never really bought into supply side reform.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,922217,00.html

A History Of US Secret Human Experimentation

1995 U.S. Government admits that it had offered Japanese war criminals and scientists who had performed human medical experiments salaries and immunity from prosecution in exchange for data on biological warfare research.
1995 Dr. Garth Nicolson, uncovers evidence that the biological agents used during the Gulf War had been manufactured in Houston, TX and Boca Raton, Fl and tested on prisoners in the Texas Department of Corrections.
http://www.rense.com/general36/history.htm

Iraq To Use Archealogical Sites As Cultural Shield?

Some military analysts have predicted that Saddam Hussein will use archaeological sites as "cultural shields" for military hardware. "He knows that the west is disinclined to destroy ancient monuments," says Garth Whitty at the Royal United Services Institute in London, who was a weapons inspector in Iraq in 1992.There were reports in the 1991 Gulf War that two MiG fighter jets were parked next to the great ziggurat of Ur, which coalition forces subsequently bombed. However, others claim this was deliberate misinformation issued to explain misdirected missiles.Modern Iraq is the site of Mesopotamia, where the worlds earliest civilisations emerged in the fourth millennium BC. The Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians all ruled empires from capitals in the country. Scholars believe the region to be the birthplace of writing and agriculture.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993532

Gamma Ray Burst In Detail

Just like ET before it, NASAs High Energy Transient Explorer (HETE) satellite called home. As a result, astronomers were able to get the most detailed pictures yet of a gamma-ray burst and the evolution of its afterglow. In a report published today in the journal Nature, researchers describe a gamma-ray burst known as GRB021004 and note that it was 10 to 100 times more powerful than they expected.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0005A5FA-0A9E-1E79-A98A809EC5880105

Robin Cook: Why I Had To Resign Over Iraq

We cannot base our military strategy on the basis that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a seri ous threat. Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of that term - namely, a credible device capable of being delivered against strategic city targets. It probably does still have biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions. But it has had them since the 1980s when the US sold Saddam the anthrax agents and the then British government built his chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years and which we helped to create? And why is it necessary to resort to war this week while Saddams ambition to complete his weapons programme is frustrated by the presence of UN inspectors? I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but 12 years in which to disarm, and our patience is exhausted. Yet it is over 30 years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/0,12956,916359,00.html

New Massive Attack Album: 100th Window

Just picked this up this weekend -- freakin brilliant. Different than Mezzanine, not quite as dark or angst-ridden (or a masterpiece), but amazing. From allmusic.com:
For better or worse, 100th Window has the same crushingly oppressive productions, dark, spiralling bass lines, and pile-driving beats instantly familiar to fans of Mezzanine. Fortunately, it also has the same depth and point-perfect attention to detail, making for fascinating listening no matter whether the focus is the songs, the effects, or even the percussion lines. Jamaican crooner Horace Andy is back for a pair of tracks ("Everywhen," "Name Taken") that nearly equal his features on the last record, while Sinéad OConnor makes her debut with three vocal features. Unlike Liz Fraser or Tracey Thorn (two Massive Attack muses from the past), OConnors voice lacks resonance and doesnt reward the close inspection that a Massive Attack production demands. Still, her songwriting is far superior and the slight quaver in her voice adds a much-needed personality to these songs. "A Prayer for England" is a political protest that aligns itself perfectly with the group that coined its name as a satirical nod to military aggression. Another feature for OConnor, "What Your Soul Sings," is the only song here that compares to the best Massive Attack has to offer, beginning with a harsh, claustrophobic atmosphere, but soon blossoming like a flower into a beautiful song led by OConnors tremulous vocals.
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=10:42:23|AM&sql=Atj90s30wa3rg

The Definitive Desktop Environment Comparison

So many operating systems and so many graphical desktop environments... This article is a comparison of the UI and usability of several Desktop Environments (DEs), that have been widely used, admired and reviled: Windows XP Luna, BeOS 6 (Dano/Zeta), Mac OS X Aqua and Unixs KDE and Gnome. Read on which one got our best score on our long term test and usage.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3064

New StrongBad (Almost) Email

Trogdor!
http://homestarrunner.com/arcadegame.html

How Hydrogen Can Save Our Economy

The cost of oil dependence has never been so clear. What had long been largely an environmental issue has suddenly become a deadly serious strategic concern. Oil is an indulgence we can no longer afford, not just because it will run out or turn the planet into a sauna, but because it inexorably leads to global conflict. Enough. What we need is a massive, Apollo-scale effort to unlock the potential of hydrogen, a virtually unlimited source of power. The technology is at a tipping point. Terrorism provides political urgency. Consumers are ready for an alternative. From Detroit to Dallas, even the oil establishment is primed for change. We put a man on the moon in a decade; we can achieve energy independence just as fast. Heres how.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/hydrogen_pr.html

Mmm... Donut-Shaped Universe

"The NY Times is reporting that data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe may suggest that the universe might be shaped like a doughnut or a cylinder: it might be possible, like in the old video game Spacewar, to drift off one side of the Universe and reappear on the other."
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/11/2229213&mode=thread&tid=134&tid=160

Canadian Junk Computers

Canadians got rid of an estimated 34,000 tons of information technology waste in 1999, according to an Environment Canada survey in 2000. Over the next five years, this amount is projected to double to approximately 67,000 tons. Betts said the United States has forecast that in the next three to four years some 500 million computers could end up as garbage. In contrast, Canada would generate about 10 percent of that, or 50 million junked computers.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,57990,00.html

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Good User Friendly

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030310

The End Of The Universe

The bad news: The universe will end in a runaway expansion so violent that galaxies and planets will be torn apart and individual atoms of human flesh will be ripped asunder in the tiniest fraction of a second.The good news: You can go ahead and book your summer holiday. It wont happen for another 22 billion years. Robert Caldwell, a physicist at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, says the doomsday scenario inverts the widespread belief that the cosmos will end with a whimper.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20030303/universe.html

Good CVS Tutorial

For all you codemonkeys out there like me doing the deep dive into CVS, especially with Eclipse, this is a good tutorial.
http://www.3plus4software.de/eclipse/cvsbasics_en.html

Dead Fly Webserver

Hertzs installation, Fly, grants us the ability to virtually possess the body of a dead, preserved fly via web-based technology. As an off-site participant we "activate" the web server, located in the flys body, by clicking a computer mouse that correspondingly illuminates tiny LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes). The viewer of the installation bears witness to this possession.Fly sets up a "double blind" - both participant and viewer are unaware of each other except through the mindless blinking of LEDs. "It" is indeed alive- but what manner of life is pure speculation? Do the blinking LEDs indicate a transformation of perception; are we somehow made "larger" by our inhabitation of the flys body? Tele-theory seeks to dissolve time, space, and scale to create a feeling of "equidistance of everyone from everyone else, and from each of us to any world event."
http://www.conceptlab.com/fly/index.html

Google A Hacktool?

Google, properly leveraged, has more intrusion potential than any hacking tool," said hacker Adrian Lamo, who recently sounded the alarm. The hacks are made possible by Web-enabled databases. Because database-management tools use canned templates to present data on the Web, typing specific phrases into Internet search tools often leads a user directly to those templated pages. For example, typing the phrase "Select a database to view" -- a common phrase in the FileMaker Pro database interface -- into Google recently yielded about 200 links, almost all of which lead to FileMaker databases accessible online.
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57897,00.html