Friday, June 10, 2005
If you're a technical person interested in digital security, here's a scary one: a team has produced two different documents, each with meaningful contents, but with identical MD5 hashes (signatures).
Tip of the hat to Bruce Schneier. The team's article is here.
This isn't quite the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, but...it shows that there might be a path there, which I for one was not expecting to be the case unless quantum computing is ever made practical.
Canada has long had socialized medicine, and its citizens have suffered greatly because of it (I can hear the liberals chanting already!). At "Enjoy Every Sandwich," the irreverent, occasionally obscene, and always funny Canadian blogger has some very interesting commentary about a recent Canadian Supreme Court ruling on the subject. An excerpt:
As is the case with mail delivery or killing unarmed Somali teenagers, the Canadian government isn't particularly efficient at it. In Ontario, where I live, health care eats up a full 40% of the provincial budget. If my math is correct, that's almost half! Half of every dollar in government spending goes toward health care. Even with 40 cents of every dollar going to health care, it hasn't stopped things like hospital closings or long lines for care.
In fact, doctors are essentially government employees in Ontario and have been since 1987. Not formally, or anything, but it stands to reason if someone dictates what you may or may not do and how much money you can make, they are your boss. As a general rule, people to not become doctor's just because they get to reach inside of you and play with your innards. While that's a bonus, doctor's go through the trouble and expense of medical school so that they may become mind-blowingly rich. As a consequence, Canadian doctors and nurses have been on a decades long exodus to the United States where they can make fuckloads of money and pay less tax on it.
Warning: if foul language and a little nudity offends you, don't click on the link above...
NASA's Deep Impact mission to the comet Tempel I will culminate on July 4 with the craft splitting into two pieces: the "impactor", an 850 pound chunk of copper that will strike the icy comet's core, and an instrument platform that will observe the comet and the impact. The science objective is to learn much more about the makeup of a comet.
Shortly after the mission was launched in January, scientists discovered that the high resolution imaging system — a key piece of instrumentation — would not focus correctly. Oops.
Now mission scientists have announced that they can "fix" the problem, with well-known deconvolution software that will "enhance" the blurry image by reversing, mathematically, the errors caused by the improperly focusing image. To do this, they had to first reconstruct the exact cause of the problem, and therein lies the achievement.
Space.com has the story. An excerpt:
However in March it was discovered that the Flyby spacecraft's High Resolution Instrument (HRI) was not focusing properly. The team will use a process, called deconvolution, to remedy the situation. Deconvolution is widely used in image processing and involves the reversal of the distortion created by the faulty lens of a camera or other optical devices, like a telescope or microscope.
"The process is a purely mathematical manipulation that works extremely well,” said Don Yoemans, a co-investigator for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). JPL is managing the mission for NASA.
“Even if you have a perfect telescope, which is limited by diffraction, you can use deconvolution to improve the resolution,” Yoeman said. “The process is sometimes time consuming, so the biggest effect on the science is a delay while you do all the processing to get the quality that you expected."
I'll bet there are some folks at NASA breathing much easier now! The whole mission story is quite interesting, and you can read about it on NASA's mission pages.
A short piece of commentary from the Wall Street Journal. It's so short that I've taken the liberty of reproducing it in its entirety:
Ever since the beginning of major combat operations in Iraq in March 2003, the media have kept a precise count of U.S. casualty figures, which now stand at nearly 1,700 killed and more than 6,400 wounded. There's also been plenty of tendentious speculation about the number of Iraqis killed by coalition action, the purpose of which is to cast Iraq's liberation as an unmitigated horror for Iraqis.
What has not been so carefully tracked, however, is the number of Iraqis killed by insurgent violence: the worshippers murdered as they pray in their mosques, the ranks of unemployed mowed down as they stand in line at government recruitment offices, and so on. We read about such incidents nearly every day but never see the cumulative death toll, perhaps because the cause of ordinary Iraqis finds few champions among trendy Western human-rights organizations.
Now the government of Iraq has gone and done that favor for itself. Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr released statistics last week showing that some 12,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed by insurgents in the last 18 months. Of these victims, the overwhelming majority have been Iraqi Shiites, indicating that what al Jazeera and friends call the "resistance against U.S. occupation" is in fact a jihadist and Baathist attack against the country's democratic government. "I have not seen any 'resistance,'" Mr. Jabr told the Washington Post. "There is terror, and all sides have agreed that anyone raising guns and killing Iraqis is a terrorist."
Too bad some of our own politicians can't show as much moral clarity. Too bad, too, that every time we magnify every U.S. misdeed in Iraq, real or fabricated, we turn our gaze from the real source of the country's misery.
Too bad, indeed.
Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touch.
H. Ross Perot
Thursday, June 9, 2005
A Spanish teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine. "House" for instance, is feminine: "la casa." "Pencil," however, is masculine: "el lápiz."
A student asked, "What gender is 'computer'?" Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split he class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether "computer" should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.
The men's group decided that "computer" should definitely be of the feminine gender ("la computadora"), because:
1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic;
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else;
3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later retrieval; and
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.
The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be masculine ("el computador"), because:
1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on;
2. They have a lot of data but still can't think for themselves;
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem; and
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better model.
The women won.
Never bring plants into the house!!!
Garden Grass Snakes (also known as Garter Snakes) can be dangerous... Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes. Here's why...
A couple in Sweetwater, Texas, had a lot of potted plants. During a recent cold spell, the wife was bringing a lot of them indoors to protect them from a possible freeze. It turned out that a little green garden grass snake was hidden in one of the plants and when it had warmed up, it slithered out and the wife saw it go under the sofa. She let out a very loud scream. The husband (who was taking a shower) ran out into the living room naked to see what the problem was.
She told him there was a snake under the sofa. He got down on the floor on his hands and knees to look for it. About that time the family dog came and cold-nosed him on the behind. He thought the snake had bitten him, so hescreamed and fell over on the floor.
His wife thought he had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told him to lie still and called an ambulance. The attendants rushed in, wouldn't listen to his protests and loaded him on the stretcher and started carrying him out.
About that time the snake came out from under the sofa and the Emergency Medical Technician saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher. That's when the man broke his leg and why he is still in the hospital.
The wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she called on a neighbor man. He volunteered to capture the snake. He armed himself with arolled-up newspaper and began poking under the couch. Soon he decided it was gone and told the woman, who sat down on the sofa in relief. But while relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where she felt the snake wriggling around. She screamed and fainted, the snake rushed back under the sofa.
The neighbor man, seeing her lying there passed out, tried to use CPR to revive her. The neighbor's wife, who had just returned from shopping at the grocery store, saw her husband's mouth on the woman's mouth and slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where it needed stitches.
The noise woke the woman from her dead faint and she saw her neighbor lying on the floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed he had been bitten by the snake. She went to the kitchen and got a small bottle of whiskey, and began pouring it down the man's throat.
By now the police had arrived. They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey, and assumed that a drunken fight had occurred. They were about to arrest them all, when the women tried to explain how it all happened over a little green snake. The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife.
The little snake again crawled out from under the sofa. One of the policemen drew his gun and fired at it. He missed the snake and hit the leg of the end table. The table fell over and the lamp on it shattered and as the bulb brokeit started a fire in the drapes.
The other policeman tried to beat out the flames, and fell through the window into the yard on top of the family dog who, startled, jumped out and raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and smashed into theparked police car.
Meanwhile, the burning drapes, were seen by the neighbors who called the fire department. The firemen had started raising the firetruck ladder when they were halfway down the street. The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires and put out the electricity and disconnected the telephones in a ten-square city block area (but they did get the house fire out). Time passed. Both men were discharged from the hospital, the house was repaired, the dog came home, the police acquired a new car, and all was right with their world.
A while later they were watching TV and the weatherman announced a cold snap for that night. The husband asked his wife if she thought they should bring in their plants for the night.
That's when she shot him.
Peggy Noonan has a great column wherein she asks the reader to participate in a thought experiment. What would happen if a leading Republican talked about Democrats using the same words that leading Democrats have been using to talk about Republicans? An excerpt:
President Bush is introduced at a great gathering in Topeka, Kan. It is the evening of June 9, 2005. Ruffles and flourishes, "Hail to the Chief," hearty applause from a packed ballroom. Mr. Bush walks to the podium and delivers the following address:
"Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I want to speak this evening about how I see the political landscape. Let me jump right in. The struggle between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is a struggle between good and evil — and we're the good. I hate Democrats. Let's face it, they have never made an honest living in their lives. Who are they, really, but people who are intent on abusing power, destroying the United States Senate and undermining our Constitution? They have no shame.
But why would they? They have never been acquainted with the truth. You ever been to a Democratic fundraiser? They all look the same. They all behave the same. They have a dictatorship, and suffer from zeal so extreme they think they have a direct line to heaven. But what would you expect when you have a far left extremist base? We cannot afford more of their leadership. I call on you to help me defeat them!"
Imagine Mr. Bush saying those things, and the crowd roaring with lusty delight. Imagine John McCain saying them for that matter, or any other likely Republican candidate for president, or Ken Mehlman, the head of the Republican National Committee.
Can you imagine them talking this way? Me neither. Because they wouldn't.
Messrs. Bush, McCain, et al., would find talk like that to be extreme, damaging, desperate. They would understand it would tend to add a new level of hysteria to political discourse, and that's not good for the country. I think they would know such talk is unworthy in a leader, or potential leader, of a great democracy. I think they would understand that talk like that is destructive to the ties that bind — and to the speaker's political prospects.
It's writing like this that gets me all gushy about Ms. Noonan. Read the whole thing, or your spouse and children may start dating camels.
Michael Goldfarb, in the Daily Standard, has a fascinating column about a potential kinetic energy weapon he calls "Rods from God":
The system would likely be comprised of tandem satellites, one serving as a communications platform, the other carrying an indeterminate number of tungsten rods, each up to 20 feet in length and 1 foot in diameter. These rods, which could be dropped on a target with as little as 15 minutes notice, would enter the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 36,000 feet per second--about as fast as a meteor. Upon impact, the rod would be capable of producing all the effects of an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon, without any of the radioactive fallout. This type of weapon relies on kinetic energy, rather than high-explosives, to generate destructive force (as do smart spears, another weapon system which would rely on tungsten rods, though not space-based).
The column is well worth reading, both for the technical details and for the political implications.
As I think about the implications of such a weapon myself, my conclusion is that it would be an almost ideal way for a (the) superpower to project power. Near-instantaneous deployment, nuclear-level power but non-nuclear, very expensive and very high-tech (thus putting it out of reach of terrorists and all but a few countries), unmanned (so no soldiers need go in harm's way), and infinitely extendable. It seems to me that (as with many weapons systems) the bulk of the investment is in up-front research and development; scaling it up would be much less expensive than developing it. Also, unlike a nuclear weapon, this not something that could be sold or otherwise tranferred to a terrorist or a rogue state — the infrastructure required to support it is substantial.
The main question I have is this: when can we have one?
The always-excellent StrategyPage has an interesting story today about recent progress in the Iraqi "wild west". It starts:
More towns in Iraqi's "wild west" are being pacified. The usual drill is not another Fallujah, but a government official meeting with local tribal and religious leaders, where an offer is made. Iraqi and American troops are coming. Neighborhoods that support the government will see little or no fighting as a search is made for weapons, bombs and the like. Neighborhoods that wish to resist will be hit hard. By now, everyone knows how smart bombs work. Increasingly, Sunni Arab leaders are being told, by their followers, that all this violence is not worth it. After Saddam fell, Sunni Arabs continued to believe in fantasies. For the last two years, the collective delusion was that the Americans had no stomach for guerilla war, and the Kurds and Shia Arabs could never get a government together. Today, Sunni Arabs who can get away on a little vacation, go north to the Kurdish north, or south to Shia Basra. In both places you can sit in an outdoor cafe without fear of a suicide bomb going off down the street. The Kurds and Shia have more jobs, more reconstruction and less crime. The Sunni Arabs don't want to live in their own mess any more. They don't want to live in a combat zone, especially while the Kurds and Shia are not.
Read the whole thing; it's well worth it.
I find this development quite encouraging, especially if it really is an accelerating trend, as the article appears to contend. A guerilla war doesn't really have a defined end (a surrender), as a more conventional war would. It seems to me that closest equivalent to a surrender in a guerilla war is when one side's civilian support disintegrates. And that's exactly what this Sunni behavior sounds like the beginning of...
The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.
Anonymous
Wednesday, June 8, 2005
Debi's a member of Emergency Animal Rescue, and this evening she got a call from the supervisor. It seems there was a fire, a big one, and not that far from our house (although the supervisor only knew generally where it was. We were asked to make a run out to the area and check it out.
So off we went, in a big hurry because the supervisor's information was quite alarming. After we drove out of our valley, we expected to be able to see the smoke plume (and if it was really a big fire, we would have). But there was no plume anywhere in sight. We drove to within about 2 miles of the fire before we saw any sign of it at all, and even then all we could see was a layer (trapped by a thermocline, most likely) of hazy brown smoke. It didn't look like an active or large fire.
In Deerhorn Valley there's a fire station, and we stopped there to get a little information from a volunteer. He told us exactly where the fire was, and told us that he believed it was under control. The location he gave us was only about three miles down the road, so we went off to see for ourselves.
Our route took us from Honey Springs Road to Deerhorn Valley Road, then three miles or so to Manzanitas Road. At that intersection we could actually see where the fire had burned, right next to a large electrical substation. There was a tanker plane circling overhead, a firefighting helicopter hovering over the burned area, at least 25 or 30 fire crew working on the ground, and several pieces of equipment (pumpers, dozers, etc.) parked around the area. Nobody had been evacuated, and the prevailing wind would have taken the fire over uninhabited areas toward Barrett Lake. From what we could see the fire was out and under control.
Whew!
After we got home, I got out my maps and did some measuring. That fire was only 6.5 miles from our home as the crow flies, though it was over 25 miles by the very indirect roads. That's close enough to be a major concern to us, had the conditions been hot, dry, and windy (in the wrong direction). As it was, we really weren't in any danger at all.
One thing that was very nice to see: firefighters were all over this fire, and apparently very quickly. By eyeball, I'd guess there was 10 to 15 acres burned; that goes very quickly in the chapparal. Those firefighters got very quickly to an area far more remote than our home. That's a nice feeling...
APOD brings us...
What has this supernova left behind? As little as 2,000 years ago, light from a massive stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Clouds (LMC) first reached planet Earth. The LMC is a close galactic neighbor of our Milky Way Galaxy and the rampaging explosion front is now seen moving out - destroying or displacing ambient gas clouds while leaving behind relatively dense knots of gas and dust. What remains is one of the largest supernova remnants in the LMC: N63A. Many of the surviving dense knots have been themselves compressed and may further contract to form new stars. Some of the resulting stars may then explode in a supernova, continuing the cycle. Pictured above is a close-up of one of the largest remaining knots of dust and gas in N63A taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. N63A spans over 25 light years and lies about 150,000 light years away toward the southern constellation of Dorado.
Click on the picture for a larger view.
Cassini brings us another spectacular image from the Saturn system:
Saturn's brightly sunlit moon Rhea commands the foreground in this image from Cassini. The planet's splendid rings are discernible in the background. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.
The spacecraft was just above the ringplane when it acquired this image, and thus captured the darkened appearance of the dense B ring when viewed with sunlight filtered through the rings. From this perspective, bright areas in the rings are regions of low density, containing very small particles that effectively scatter light toward Cassini.
North on Rhea is up and rotated about 25 degrees to the left. This view shows principally the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Rhea. The right side of Rhea is overexposed.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 540,000 kilometers (340,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 110 degrees. The image scale is 3 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage.
Click on the image for a larger view.
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.
Hannah More
Monday, June 6, 2005
Michael Yon has filed another report from Northern Iraq. An excerpt:
Iraq's army accordioned in defeat, and the first Coalition folded most of their tents and sailed home, leaving the Kurds to fend for themselves. Saddam had revenge on his breath when he turned his attention north and unsheathed his fury against the Kurds. Initially a slaughter of wholesale proportions, somehow, still the Kurds kept fighting. They hung on until the US gave military support and maintained the no-fly zone overhead. In 1993, Mr. Qatou was able to return to the rubble that had once been Yezdinar.
An Iraqi. A Kurd. A Yezidi. A village Headman. Whatever the label, more than forty years after his birth, this man came home. Only now, after the latest war, does Mr. Qatou finally have confidence in the peace, after more than a half century of life lived under orders or under sentence.
This seemed like the moment to ask the question, "What do you think of the United States?"
"We cry when America loses one soldier. We pray for the soldiers every night."
Don't miss this latest in Michael's excellent series of postings...
Sunday, June 5, 2005
APOD brings us...
Most bright stars in our Milky Way Galaxy reside in a disk. Since our Sun also resides in this disk, these stars appear to us as a diffuse band that circles the sky. The above panorama of a northern band of the Milky Way's disk covers 90 degrees and is a digitally created mosaic of several independent exposures. Scrolling right will display the rest of this spectacular picture. Visible are many bright stars, dark dust lanes, red emission nebulae, blue reflection nebulae, and clusters of stars. In addition to all this matter that we can see, astronomers suspect there exists even more dark matter that we cannot see.
This photo is even more beautiful than the usual fare from APOD — you don't want to miss it! Click on the picture for a larger view.
Today's San Diego Union-Tribune has a heart-warming story about a 74 year old mother receiving a kidney from her 44 year old son:
Three months later, his mother needed a kidney. While on a trip to Oshkosh, Wis., she noticed her ankles were swollen. Within a few months, her kidneys failed. She began going to dialysis treatments three times a week. The procedures exhausted her. Her health deteriorated quickly. She had a stroke and needed surgery to remove her diseased kidneys before a transplant could be considered.
The average wait for a kidney from the transplant donation list in San Diego County is two to five years, said Landes' transplant surgeon, Dr. Evan Vapnek.
Mary Lou Landes, 74, received her son's kidney May 19, 2004. The next day, he said, "she looked like she had 10 years ago. I hadn't realized how ashen she had become, and now her eye had a sparkle in it again.""Younger, healthier people can stand dialysis for many, many years, but older people don't do well," Vapnek said. "She would not have been able to wait long enough to get a kidney off the list."
A donation from a living family member wouldn't necessarily save her. She was older than the typical recipient and her health was poor. During a family dinner at an Italian restaurant in Fallbrook, Landes and his brother and sister all said they were willing to give their mother a kidney. They decided, though, that because of his job flexibility, Landes would be the best choice.
That's quite a gift mom got!
Via Gateway Pundit, an article and photos about Azerbaijanis demonstrating for freedom:
Thousands of opposition protesters chanted "Freedom!" and carried pictures of President Bush as they marched across Azerbaijan's capital Saturday, urging the government of this U.S. ally to step down and allow free parliamentary elections this year.
The massive rally in Baku was the largest opposition demonstration in the former Soviet republic since October 2003, when one person died and nearly 200 were injured in clashes between police and demonstrators protesting vote-rigging in the presidential election.
Tensions have been building steadily in this oil-rich Caspian Sea nation in the run-up to parliamentary elections set for November, leading some observers to predict that Azerbaijan could see a massive uprising similar to those that toppled unpopular regimes in other ex-Soviet nations of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan during the past 18 months.
The Anchoress and I have the same reaction: isn't it just interesting as all get out that the protesters are holding up pictures of George W. Bush on their posters?
Think about it: in the context of today, if you're living under the bootheel of a repressive government and you work up the courage to openly demonstrate, who's your message going to be aimed at? You only have one agenda — you want help in freeing the people of your country (along with yourself, of course). So you aim your message at the one person or country that you believe will be most effective in helping you. The people of Azerbaijan apparently understand that that means George W. Bush and the United States. Not Putin and Russia, but also not...Chirac and France, Schroeder and Germany, and so on. No, you don't look to their ilk for help in freeing yourself. You look to the United States and its leader.
These pictures are good evidence that the people who really matter have figured out how the world really works. Despite the best efforts of the MSM to "educate" them.
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.
Henri Poincaré
