Saturday, June 14, 2008

Beauty Before Common Sense...

Here's an example of the weighty matters our U.S. Congressman choose to spend their time on:
Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner, a 43-year-old bachelor, has proposed legislation giving international beauties their own U.S. visa category, rather than have them compete with computer analysts and scientists for the non-immigrant H-1B visa for skilled professionals.
Congressman Anthony Weiner (D), at your service.

Rope.
Tree.
Congressman.
Some assembly required.

Boumediene, Part II...

Beldar is dead on target:

The Supreme Court ruled today that terrorists who are citizens of foreign countries, who have never set foot within the United States, and who have systematically forfeited all the protections of the organized laws of warfare that would entitle them to be treated as prisoners of war, are, when captured on foreign battlefields by the U.S. military, nevertheless entitled to access to the federal court system of the United States — in most essential respects, exactly as if they were lawful, taxpaying citizens born here, raised here, and arrested here by the domestic police for alleged crimes committed here.

If Osama bin Laden, wearing no uniform, surrounded by children as human shields, and in mid-stroke while he's sawing the head off a captured American nurse, is captured by American soldiers tomorrow in Pakistan or Afghanistan, then his rights to use the federal writ of habeas corpus to guarantee him the protections afforded by the United States Constitution will be, so far as I can determine, indistinguishable from my own if I were arrested at my home by the Houston Police Department on a warrant for overdue parking tickets.

The Supreme Court has so ordered notwithstanding the fact that the people's lawful representatives — through statutes passed by their Congress, and signed into law by their president — had otherwise decreed. Instead, five members of the Supreme Court have set themselves up above the rest of the people and government of the United States of America, and they have proclaimed that even acting together, the Congress and president lack the constitutional power to make other provisions for these foreign barbarians and monsters captured on foreign battlefields while trying to destroy America and everything related to it.
He concludes with this:

This decision is a disgrace and a travesty. It's awful law and even more disastrous policy. It's the single worst decision of the United States Supreme Court in my lifetime, and quite arguably its worst in American history. It can't be sugar-coated. It can't be minimized. In all probability, it can only be thoroughly undone by a constitutional amendment, or by a pronounced change in the membership of the Court that will deprive the liberal wing of a crucial fifth vote in such cases and open the possibility of this decision being overruled.

...

Our enemies will never defeat us. We have the power to defeat ourselves, however, and today's decision by the Supreme Court is a terrible, tragic step toward such a defeat. What will you do in November? Will you help accelerate these judicial power-grabs? Or will you help reverse them?

His point is exactly in line with my own feelings on the matter: Boumediene looks a lot like a European-style societal suicide. The decision is a horrifying example of one of the few real consequences of electing a liberal President: they get to appoint the Supreme Court justices.

Read the whole thing.

HMS Ontario ... Found!

The HMS Ontario was a British frigate operating on the Great Lakes in the Revolutionary War. It never saw action, but on October 17, 1780 it sank in a gale on Lake Ontario, and all on board were lost (a crew of 40 Canadians, about 60 Redcoats, and 30 or so American prisoners of war). A few pieces of wreckage were recovered, and a few bodies – but for more than 200 years there hasn't been any trace of it.

Archaeologists, scientists, and shipwreck enthusiasts have been searching for the HMS Ontario's grave ever since it sank. Until just a few days ago, none of them have had any success. Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville, two well-known shipwreck enthusiasts, have found the HMS Ontario – in remarkably good condition, fully intact and upright in about 500 feet of water.

Here's an article about their find, another here, and this site has some photos of the actual shipwreck. Hats off to these two intrepid amateurs – what a find!

The Amazing HiRISE...

I've written several times about the HiRISE camera system on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter robotic explorer that's orbiting Mars. The photo at right (click to enlarge) is one that it took recently. There are thousands of photos like this on the HiRISE web site, available for all to peruse. I have spent hours just staring at the amazingly detailed views of Mars – a destination that seemed so exotic and impossible when I was a kid, and now our robotic emissaries are exploring it almost routinely.

In this one photo you can see fantastical terracing (through wind erosion, I presume), sand dunes on the bottoms of the old craters, and a small, fresh crater (bluish gray in the lower left) with ejecta splashed on the surrounding terrain. Strange bumps and valleys dot the landscape. In a few places you can see tracks from falling boulders or perhaps landslides. The terrain on Mars is much more varied than I'd have guessed – if you look at a few dozen HiRISE photos, you'll see what I mean – there's little commonality from one area to another...

The photo at right is also by HiRISE, but of a very different kind than it usually takes. First, the “look angle” is very oblique – normally HiRISE looks almost straight down at the surface. The purpose for this oblique look is also unusual: the researchers were trying to capture the Phoenix Lander while it was still in the atmosphere, under its parachute, headed for its landing – and they succeeded! Click to enlarge the photo to see what I mean...

Sunrise Over Lawson Valley...

Summertime each year brings us a special treat – beautiful sunrises that fill our windows. This is what we saw just before 5 AM this morning...

The reason summertime is different is that our windows face north, and in the summer, the sun rises far more to the north than in the rest of the year, when it rises mostly in the east. We have no windows in our house facing east, and there are trees and mountains between us and the easter morning skies – so Mother Nature doesn't give us a morning show until the summer.

I was outside just before sunrise this morning, working away on whacking down the weeds. This time of year, it's mainly mustard (with a few filary left to irritate me). I expected to be limited in my “outside time” by the heat – the forecast calls for near 90° heat today. But while it was still cool outside, something else drove me indoors: deer flies. Big, biting flies that we only get sporadically on very quiet days. I finally gave up when I was getting bitten at the rate of about once per 30 seconds; I just couldn't stand it anymore!

The photo at right (click on either one to enlarge them) was taken perhaps five minutes after the photo above, zoomed in to show the detail within the cloud. The early morning's near-horizontal rays greatly accentuate the texture within the clouds...

An aside on the photography: since my main computer is now a Mac, I was faced with a dilemma – should I purchase a second copy of PhotoShop for the Mac (hundreds of dollars), or should I try to use one of the open source photo editors (free)? This is a question that's unfortunately much more difficult than just the price: I have spent over a decade using PhotoShop, and I've become reasonably compentent with it. Photo editors, perhaps especially PhotoShop, have a well-deserved reputation for being difficult and counter-intuitive to use. Spending a lot of time learning a new application was not an attractive thought, so this was not a decision I took lightly. In the end, I decided to try the most famous of the open source photo editors: The Gimp. Short result: I'm glad I did – it's a perfectly usable photo editor, and (for me, at least) remarkably easy to learn how to use. It's missing some features I used in PhotoShop, but this is more than compensated for by some features it has that PhotoShop doesn't, and the fact that it is free.

This marks a milestone for me: PhotoShop was the last significant piece of commercial software (other than the operating system itself) that was part of my normal working set of software. I now use free open source software for nearly everything I do. There's really only one piece of commercial software that I have yet to find a good substitute for: Visio. But my use of Visio doesn't justify buying it, so I make do with functionally inferior open source subtitutes (most recently Open Office's “Draw”).

As for the operating system... If my choices today were limited to Windows Vista and Linux, I'd pick Linux. However, happily for me there is another choice: the Mac's OS/X, and that's now my operating system of choice (for a workstation or laptop, that is)...