Maudlin Drivel

Vintage Mark Steyn here. An excerpt (but be careful to swallow your coffee first):

Ever since prolonged attendance at "the world's greatest deliberative body" during the Clinton impeachment trial, my general line on the U.S. Senate has been to commend the example of New Zealand: They had a Senate, and they abolished it.

But, until that blessed day, I'd have been quite content for the John Roberts confirmation hearings to go on for another six months, couple of years, half a decade, until the last registered Democrat on the planet expired in embarrassment at the sheer maudlin drivel of it all. It was obvious on the first day about 20 minutes in — i.e., about halfway through Joe Biden's first question — that the Democrats had nothing on Roberts. But they're game guys and, like the fellow in a tight spot in a caper movie, they stuck their right hands in their pockets, pointed them through the material and pretended they had a real gun in there. By the second day, their pants had fallen down, but they bravely stood there waggling their fingers at the nominee and insisting they had enough firepower to blow his head off.

Ah, there's nothing like a fresh Mark Steyn column in the morning!

Harvest Moon

Something startled our dogs at around 3:30 am this morning, waking me up — and then something startled me: the very bright light streaming in our bedroom window. It appeared to be just a little bit too bright to be the moonlight. We live in a rural area with no artificial sources of light around, so my sleepy brain was scrambling for explanations. But when I got up and peered through the window, an amazing sight greeted me: it was moonlight, so bright that I could (just barely) make out colors and textures in my yard.

So I got dressed, let the dogs out into the yard, and went out myself to see what this brightly moonlit night might look like. Standing on our patio and looking to the north, I could see several unusual and surprising things. The muted greens and browns in the chapparal covering the low mountains about two miles to our north were clearly visible. The sky in the northeast quarter, opposite the full moon, was distinctly lighter and had tinges of blue. The Italian stone pines in my yard, about 10 meters high, were crisply lit — and green. The reddish flagstones of our patio were ... reddish. And when I turned to the southwest and looked at the moon itself, the darned thing was so big and bright that it put a hurt on my eyeballs!

This needed explaining. Why, on this particular night, was the moon so much brighter than usual?

My first thought was that perhaps the weather conditions were unusual. Looking at the sky, I could easily see that it was clear of clouds ... but I could also see a little backscatter (a background glow), indicating that there was at least a little haze in the air. Looking at my weather instruments showed it was 60°F and 25% relative humidity — beautiful weather, to be sure ... but not at all unusual here. The barometer was dropping, but only within normal and common range. Conclusion: nothing unusual enough about the weather to explain the brightness.

So I did what any amateur scientist would do in this situation. I fired up Google, and started looking for information about bright full moons.

And I got some answers (very quickly, actually). It's all about the perigee. It turns out that the moon's orbit around the Earth is not exactly circular — at apogee (or furthest point) it is about 406 thousand kilometers from Earth; at perigee (or nearest point) it is about 360 thousand kilometers from Earth. The photos at right show the moon at perigee (left) and apogee (right); the apparent size difference is obvious. That's roughly a 10% difference in distance, but from John Walker's Fourmilab we find out that makes about a 30% difference in brightness:

How Bright the Moonlight?

When the Moon is full near perigee, you'd expect it to be brighter than a full Moon near apogee and it is: lots brighter; let's figure out how much. Since the Moon shines by reflecting sunlight (not very well — it reflects only about 7% of the light that strikes it, comparable to a lump of coal) the following two factors determine the intensity of moonlight at the Earth:

1. The intensity of sunlight striking the Moon.
2. The distance reflected light travels from the Moon to the Earth.

Since the difference between the minimum and maximum distance of the Moon, 50345 km, is an insignificant fraction of the average distance from the Sun to the Earth and Moon, 149597870 km, the intensity of sunlight at the Moon can be considered constant and ignored in this calculation. (Sunlight intensity at the Moon does vary, of course, due to the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, but we'll ignore that smaller annual effect here since we're concentrating on lunar perigee and apogee.)

The intensity of light varies as the inverse square of the distance between a light source and the observer, so taking the ratio between the perigee and apogee distances in the photographs above as typical, the distance at apogee was 1.1363 times the perigee distance, and hence the Moon's intensity at perigee was the square of this quantity, 1.2912 times brighter--about 30%. Using the long-term extremes plotted in the drawing in the previous section yields only a slightly greater intensity difference: a distance variation of 1.1413, with the Moon shining 1.3026 times brighter at perigee.

But the full moon isn't always at perigee. The moon is at perigee once in each of its orbits (each 27.3 days); full moons occur every 29.5 days. The difference between the two is due to the Earth's rotation around the sun. The result is that the moon is at different distances from the Earth during each full moon, but those distances can be calculated easily (see here and here). And it turns out that for tonight, the full moon occurred very near perigee, which was just two days ago (on September 16th).

In addition to the distance of the moon from the Earth, it also turns out that the distance from the sun to the Earth makes a difference (as Mr. Walker mentions above), albeit a much smaller one. Perihelion is the closest approach of the Earth to the sun, and it occurs in early January each year. At perihelion the sun (and therefore the reflected sunlight of the full moon) is about 7% brighter than at aphelion (when the Earth is most distant from the sun, in early July). Currently we're just under halfway through that cycle, so the full moon is about 3% brighter than it would be under the same conditions in July.

So there you have it! The moon tonight was about a third (33%) brighter than at its dimmest — and this is a fairly unusual combination of events to make it this bright. Of course it didn't hurt a bit that our viewing conditions were near perfect!

I'll leave you with a few other interesting sites I found on bright moons: here, here, here, and here.

Porcupine Babies

Oh, my.

sarcasm alert! Aren't they just darling?

A little web research leads me to believe these are actually hedgehog babies. See information here, here, here, and here.

The reason I was doing the web research is that it occurred to me to wonder what agony the mother porcupine hedgehog had to endure while giving birth to these well-defended babies. It turns out (for both porcupines and hedgehogs) that the babies are born furred and spiked, but the spikes are "pliable" when born. They harden in a few hours and the little tykes are thus fully defended.

Thank goodness!

Cindy's Decline

Remember Cindy Sheehan, the distraught mother of a soldier who was killed in Iraq? For weeks, our MSM was full of Cindy Sheehan — she was page one in nearly every print media, and one of the lead stories on every broadcast.

So what happened to her? She's all but disappeared from the MSM. The only news reports I've been able to find are buried and ... discreet ... especially if you happen to know what she's really been saying. For example, consider this recent quote (about the aftermath of Katrina):

I don’t care if a human being is black, brown, white, yellow or pink. I don’t care if a human being is Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or pagan. I don’t care what flag a person salutes: if a human being is hungry, then it is up to another human being to feed him/her. George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self from power. The only way America will become more secure is if we have a new administration that cares about Americans even if they don’t fall into the top two percent of the wealthiest.

This quote has been circulating the blogosphere for a couple of days. My first reaction upon reading this: Cindy needs to visit a shrink, and I hope that whatever ails her can be helped with psychoactive drugs (because they work quickly). Dig a little more, and you'll find that she's been spouting a lot of stuff like this, and worse.

I think she's embarrassing the lefties that embraced her when they thought she would help them in their Bush-bashing. I suspect that ever since a little bit of her craziness became visible while she was still at Crawford, her new-found liberal "friends" have been carefully managing her press contacts, in an effort to shield the world from full knowledge of Cindy. You know ... like parents used to do to hide the 'shame' of their pregnant daughter...

Rick Moran, over at Right Wing Nut House, has some similar thoughts. An excerpt:

Does she realize what her benefactors have done to her?

These are not your garden variety leftist lickspittles who are holding Cindy Sheehan hostage. The hard-eyed men and women who now surround her are not interested in political change except as it can be used to achieve their revolutionary ends. People like Cindy Sheehan (unwittingly?) and Ward Churchill (willingly) are stage actors in their Grand Drama of the Republic. They are the cockroaches of our culture who thrive on chaos, grow strong in disaster, and whose message resonates the most with those on the fringes of society.

Thus are the armies of the revolution built.

They have learned their revolutionary craft at the feet of the masters.

It's an excellent piece; you'll want to read the whole thing.

Galloway Slapped Down

Way down. Christopher Hitchens (at Slate) slaps George Galloway into a deep, hole in the ground! An excerpt:

Galloway's preferred style is that of vulgar ad hominem insult, usually uttered while a rather gaunt crew of minders stands around him. I have a thick skin and a broad back and no bodyguards. He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a "popinjay" (true enough, since its original Webster's definition means a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest). In a recent interview he made opprobrious remarks about the state of my midriff, which I will confess has—as P.G. Wodehouse himself once phrased it—"slipped down to the mezzanine floor." In reply I do not wish to stoop. Those of us who revere the vagina are committed to defend it against the very idea that it is a mouth or has teeth. Study the photographs of Galloway from Syrian state television, however, and you will see how unwise and incautious it is for such a hideous person to resort to personal remarks. Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled the whole effect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs.

Sheesh, I hope I never piss off Mr. Hitchens! The rest of this column is just as good, though for different reasons — you really don't want to miss it (at the link above).

A tip of the hat to Saint Paul, at Fraters Libertas; I wouldn't have found it without you...

Hawra

Hawra — a little girl from Rashid, Iraq — suffered severe burns when she was caught in a cross-fire between terrorists and coalition forces. As she recuperates, her spirit motivates injured troops at the aid station.

From the 4th Brigade Combat Team Public Affairs Office, through Cool Blue Blog comes this touching story about Hawra and Sgt. Tracy Perfors, a medic assigned to C Company, 703rd Forward Support Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division. An excerpt:

Perfors was the only female medic on shift that day, so she spent the afternoon with Hawra assisting with her medical care. She listened as the little girl told stories of life in Iraq since Saddam and of living with her 11 brothers and sisters. Hawra raved about the chance to eat cheeseburgers and macaroni and cheese when she visited the aid station — “it was the largest meal she ate all week,” Perfors said.

Hawra also told Perfors about her dream of going to school in the fall and maybe one day having a family of her own.

“Hawra had captivated me,” Perfors said. “I found it astonishing that a person with her medical problems and family history could remain so upbeat.”

As they say, read the whole thing. And poke around Cool Blue a bit; there's lots of good stuff there. Don't miss his picture galleries!

How Specs Live Forever

Via friends at work (thanks, Rick and Johnny!):

The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long-distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts. So who built these old rutted roads?

The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Thus we have the answer to the original questions. The United States standard rail gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs and Bureaucracies live forever.

So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.

There are some parallels to this in the software world; the Windows API comes right to mind...

Hard to be the Bad Guy

On today's military news about Iraq from Strategy Page, there's an interesting article about the effects of the recent battles in Tal Afar and the significance of the increasing competence and capabilities of the Iraqi Army and police forces. An excerpt:

Meanwhile, in Tal Afar, ... thousands of local civilians are being hired for reconstruction jobs. American civil affairs units have been most aggressive with this tactic, developed and honed over the last two years. Even while the fighting is going on, civil affairs teams are noting what infrastructure is in need of rebuilding, or is getting damaged. As soon as Iraqi police declare a neighborhood pacified, hiring begins to help unload and distribute relief supplies, rebuild roads and electrical systems, and do any other jobs that need being done. Workers are paid daily, and given one more reason to stay away from the terrorist organizations. Not that a lot of unemployed Sunni Arabs need much encouragement there. By now, it’s almost impossible to get volunteers to attack the Americans, and prices to hire people for that work keep going up. Shooting at Americans is seen as suicide, because not only do the Americans promptly shoot back very accurately, but they then come after you. The Americans have those damn little planes in the sky, the ones with cameras, making it difficult for attackers to hide or get away. It’s much easier to attack Iraqi police or soldiers. But these guys are now wearing body armor, and will counter-attack as well. Worse, the Iraqi police will start questioning people in the area, put up roadblocks, and hunt you down. It’s getting so hard to be a bad guy in Iraq.

"It's getting so hard to be a bad guy in Iraq." I had to smile when I read that...

This sounds to me like Iraq is at, or on the threshold of, a "tipping point" — a point where historians will someday say "This is when Iraqi democracy turned the corner, when it became clear that it was going to prevail." If so, that's very good news indeed.

BTW, if you're not familiar with StrategyPage, they're well worth your time for an occasional visit. There aren't many places where one can find the kind of sober and balanced reporting that is on their pages every day.

Java Resources

For the non-geekly ones amongst my readers: this post is not about coffee! It is about some of the difficulties with resources in the Java programming language, and what I did about it. If you're not a Java programmer, this would a good time to skip to the next post.

But if you are a Java programmer...

If you've ever tried to design a flexible and extensible library in Java, there's a good chance you've bumped into this frustrating issue: the standard Java libraries don't provide any way to enumerate the resources (including class files) in a package, much less a whole tree of a package and its sub-packages. There's a good reason for this: the standard Java libraries do not assume that a package's resources are stored in a searchable system, like a file system or a jar file. Instead, they assume that packages might be loaded over the network, or by carrier pigeon, or (sometime in the future) through spontaneous wormholes. In these non-searchable systems, the only way to grab a resource would be to address it directly by name. You can't search them and you can't enumerate them.

But...what if you know that in your case, your resources will be stored in (and loaded from) a searchable system? Surely 99%+ of all Java code written falls into this bucket! Well, the standard Java libraries don't help you out a bit in this case. This most common situation is simply not handled. And darn it, that's very awkward!

For example, suppose you are building a library that is all about tracking genetics of farm animals, and you include objects for Cow, Horse, Hog, and a few others. But you'd really like other programmers to be able to create their own objects (perhaps Penguin, Meerkat, or Dragon), and have those objects automatically register themselves with your genetics library. That's where you bump into this problem. What you'd really like to do is to have your genetics library, on startup, search for classes that implement your new Genetics interface; then your library could automatically load and use them. The alternatives are a little clunkier. You could require new objects to be manually registered (but what a pain, and error prone!), or you could (yuk!) require the new objects to be compiled right into your standard library. Wouldn't it be nice to eliminate all that?

That's what the new org.jopen.util.resources package does. With it, you can write a piece of code like this:

ResourceSet rs1 = new ResourceSet();
ResourceFilter rf1 = new ResourceTypeFilter( FilterOutcome.Exclude, FilterOutcome.Uncertain, "class" );
ResourceFilter rf2 = new PackageFilter( FilterOutcome.Exclude, FilterOutcome.Uncertain, "META-INF", true );
ResourceFilter rf3 = new IsAPackageFilter( FilterOutcome.Exclude, FilterOutcome.Uncertain );
ResourceFilter rf4 = new ResourceTypeFilter( FilterOutcome.Exclude, FilterOutcome.Uncertain, "properties" );
ResourceFilter rf5 = new ResourceTypeFilter( FilterOutcome.Exclude, FilterOutcome.Uncertain, "gif" );
ResourceFilterChain rfc1 = ResourceFilterChain.createInclude();
rfc1.add( rf1, rf2, rf3, rf4, rf5 );
rs1.addPackage( "org.jopen", true, rfc1, null );


These few lines of code do the following: look in the package org.jopen and its sub-packages for all resources, excluding class files, excluding META-INF packages, excluding packages themselves, excluding properties files, and excluding .GIF files -- and make a set from all those resources remaining.

That's a complicated task I just described, and would be quite challenging to implement if you didn't know a little trick we used when implementing this package. That trick: when you use ClassLoader.getResource(), it returns a URL instance. If the URL points to a file or a jar (and you can easily tell this by looking at the URL), then you can figure out exactly where in the file system or in a particular jar the resource is located. And...the ClassLoader.getResource() method can be invoked with a package name. Ah ha! With that little bit of information, the problem becomes solvable. Which is what we did with JOpen.util.resources!

Now we also went a little crazy with some nice features like chainable filters, a special ClassResource that lets you easily work with class files, and more. Go check it out on the JOpen site, where you'll find links to both the javadocs and the source code.

Enjoy!

APOD

APOD brings us...

Approaching the nucleus of comet Tempel 1 at ten kilometers per second, the Deep Impact probe's targeting camera recorded a truly dramatic series of images. Successive pictures improve in resolution and have been composited here at a scale of 5 meters per pixel -- including images taken within a few meters of the surface moments before the July 4th impact. Analyzing the resulting cloud of debris, researchers are directly exploring the makeup of a comet, a primordial chunk of solar system material. Described as a recipe for primordial soup, the list of Tempel 1's ingredients - tiny grains of silicates, iron compounds, complex hydrocarbons, and clay and carbonates thought to require liquid water to form - might be more appropriate for a cosmic souffle, as the nucleus is apparently porous and fluffy. Seen here, Tempel 1's nucleus is about five kilometers long, with the impact site between the two large craters near the bottom.

Very interesting how they put this synthetic image together; a good demonstration of the power of modern computers. This would have been impossible not so very long ago...

The science reports starting to trickle out show Tempel-1 being surprisingly fluffy; a collection of powder "snow" (made of an exotic chemical mix) and sand that is just barely held together by the weak gravity of the "snowball". Before the mission scientists had a range of expectations about the comet's composition, from solid rock to "wet snowball". Tempel-1 seems to be outside that entire range...

Click on the picture for a larger view.

We Will Never Forget

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, September 13, 2005, in a press conference with President Bush in Washington, D.C.:

“In the name of Iraqi people, I say to you, Mr. President, and to the glorious American people, thank you, thank you. Thank you, because you liberated us from the worst kind of dictatorship.”

“Mr. President, you are a visionary, great statesman. We salute you. We are grateful to you. We will never forget what you have done for our people.”

Reflect for a moment about what had to take place in order for the leader of a free Iraqi to have the opportunity to meet an American leader and express that sentiment. That little speech was the puncuation on what future historians will surely see as an important episode in 21st century history. But did you see this reported in the MSM? Most likely not. The Anchoress says it well:

Try to find some coverage of this on the television - you won’t see more than 30 seconds of it, and it’s all about the press playing “gotcha” with President Bush.

This is a historic moment…Talabani’s generous and moving statement should have been a moment of national pride - a moment for all of us to consider the great sacrifices made by our troops and their families to bring Iraq’s great hope about. Instead…pushed aside because the press is interested in NOTHING but “getting” Bush. Not a single question to Talabani.

This is sick, sick, SICK.

A while ago, I wondered if the press still wanted what was best for America - I wondered it because they seem so resolutely unwilling to print a good word about anything - not the Katrina rescuers, not the troops in Iraq who are doing heroic work, nothing…it’s just “blastBushblastBushblastBush” all the time. Their hatred is in control of them. Very sad, very sick.

She's right, of course. It is very sad, and in its own way, sick. But lets be careful about how we direct that anger and righteous indignation: the MSM reports in this manner not because they're all a bunch of evil liberal monkeys. They report in this manner because behaving like evil liberal monkeys is gets them lots of viewers, and therefore lots of advertising revenue. If only Howard Dean and Ted Kennedy watched CNN, and only Hilary Clinton had a subscription to the New York Times, and only Joe Biden and Robert Byrd read the Washington Post ... then they'd be out of business in very short order. Well, actually, their CEOs would see this happening and would change the way they reported until they figured out what they had to do to get an interesting number of viewers.

In other words, the reason we don't see the news objectively reported in the MSM is because the MSM (which is very much a business) has figured out that there is too much business opportunity with other modes of presentation. I'll remind you that we do have some objective media: the Wall Street Journal comes immediately to mind, with its focus on helping the business world understand what is really happening in the world. And Fox is somewhere in between. But the shrill, sensationalist, loosely-rooted-in-the-facts kind of presentation dominates because the majority of the viewers prefer it. For some of us, that's a very uncomfortable fact. When one explores the implications of that fact, you can't help but ponder on the impact it has on the workings of a popular democracy. It can be a scary thought...

Hayabusa

Do you know about Hayabusa?

Thought not. It's a Japanese robotic space probe, designed to rendezvous with the asteroid Itokawa, study it, grab a sample from its surface, and return that sample to Earth. Furthermore, it is semi-autonomous (meaning that it needs very little help from Earth) and powered by an exotic ion-drive engine.

And it has just arrived at its target. Hayabusa is now hovering about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Itokawa, with nearly zero relative velocity. It's ready to start its two-month exploration, after which the ion drive will light up again to boost the little spacecraft back to Earth, where it will re-enter the atmosphere over the outback of Australia and its payload of asteriod samples will be recovered.

The ion engine has only been used a few times before, mainly on experimental flights. Instead of generating thrust by chemical heat-generating reactions (as conventional chemical rockets work), the ion engine uses electricity generated by solar panels to accelerate electrically charged particles (ions) at extremely high speeds. The "kickback" from this acceleration provides the thrust, and it does so with great efficiency. The high efficiency comes from two things: the high velocity of the accelerated particles (far higher than the exhaust velocity of a chemical rocket), and the fact that the source of energy (the sun) has almost no mass on the spacecraft (just the solar panels) — so the spacecraft doesn't have to push it's own fuel, as with a chemical rocket.

Congratulations to the team who put Hayabusa together! And may this initial success be a preview of the entire mission...

A break, cont'd

A few days ago, I posted about an apparent break in our streak of hot, dry weather. Well, that break has continued, as you can see at right. Since I last posted on the morning of the ninth, we've settled down into a very pleasant pattern of weather: daytime highs in the 70s, and evening lows in the 40s. During the day we have comfortable relative humidity around 30%, and in the evenings it shoots up to near 100%. Just lovely!

Saturday (the 10th) was my birthday, and in celebration we took two walks in the fine weather. And we had large quantities of excellent sushi at Chef Taka's in La Mesa. Yum!

As usual, click on the picture for a larger view. As previously, the data displayed were taken from my weather station...

Condor's Gut

Hedwig at Living the Scientific Life has an interesting post on the current state of the California Condor. An excerpt about an ailing condor chick:

After transporting the chick to the Los Angeles Zoo, and following a three-hour operation, an astounding amount of material was removed from the ventriculus and proventriculus of the condor chick. The following items were among the debris removed from the chick: 4 bottle caps and a screw top, 3 electrical fittings, 5 washers, 13 22-caliber shell-casings, 1 38-caliber shell-casing, a shotgun-shell, several pieces of plastic bags, about a quarter cup of broken glass and a similar amount of broken plastic, a few small pieces of fabric, 4 small stones, a metal bracket, a piece of wire, and a few small pieces of rubber.

Fortunately, it did not appear that any of this remarkable collection of detritus perforated the gut, and currently the chick appears to be doing well.

The ponder is this: what led the chick's parents to feed it all this junk? Is it just that one of the parents is particularly attracted to shiny things? Or is it a characteristic of the species?

The author of the post (Jerry W. Davis) doesn't answer that question, but he does mention how well, in general, the condors are doing. I may be guilty of over-simplifying the issue here, but ... it seems to me that if the condor recovery is going well, with an increasing population, then ... it's probably true that the condors are not full of shiny metal and glass junk. I hope my logic is correct!

Dumb Ideas

The field of Information Technology (IT) security — part of my work for many years now — is notoriously full of uninformed "experts", snake-oil salesmen, useless (or even harmful) technology, and poor management. In my own experience, the majority of the effort and money poured into "IT security" is completely wasted — or worse, actually causes harm either directly or by diverting resources away from efforts that would actually increase security. For example, I've had bosses demand that we install an extra firewall, but refuse to spend 10% of that cost on educating employees about social engineering attacks. Really dumb.

Marcus Ranum (a well-known figure in the IT security world) has an article called the "Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security". It's an interesting and amusing read. My favorite:

#6) Action is Better Than Inaction

IT executives seem to break down into two categories: the "early adopters" and the "pause and thinkers." Over the course of my career, I've noticed that dramatically fewer of the "early adopters" build successful, secure, mission-critical systems. This is because they somehow believe that "Action is Better Than Inaction" - i.e.: if there's a new whizzbang, it's better to install it right now than to wait, think about it, watch what happens to the other early adopters, and then deploy the technology once it's fully sorted-out and has had its first generation of experienced users. I know one senior IT executive - one of the "pause and thinkers" whose plan for doing a wireless roll-out for their corporate network was "wait 2 years and hire a guy who did a successful wireless deployment for a company larger than us." Not only will the technology be more sorted-out by then, it'll be much, much cheaper. What an utterly brilliant strategy!

There's an important corollary to the "Action is Better Than Inaction" dumb idea, and it's that: "It is often easier to not do something dumb than it is to do something smart."Sun Tzu didn't really write that in "The Art of War" but if you tell IT executives that he did, they'll take you much more seriously when you counsel a judicious, thoughtful approach to fielding some new whizzbang. To many of my clients, I have been counselling, "hold off on outsourcing your security for a year or two and then get recommendations and opinions from the bloody, battered survivors - if there are any."

Indeed.
Thanks to Bruce Schneier (who doesn't always agree with Marcus) for the pointer...

Wolfram Tones

Stephen Wolfram has published (free, on the web) an application that uses some of his theoretical work to compose music. Not just synthesize a melody that a human wrote, but to actually compose the melody. The application will, on demand, compose new pieces in a specified style, and play them for you or let you download them as a ringtone.

I tried several different settings (there are many), and I was surprised at the results. Nothing I heard smacked of a Top 10 hit or an acclaimed symphony, but...all were at least pleasant to listen to, reminiscent of the requested style, and surprisingly not machine-like. An interesting exploration.

From the WolframTones web site (their "About" page):

When prominent scientist Stephen Wolfram published A New Kind of Science in 2002, it was immediately hailed as a major intellectual landmark. Today the paradigm shift that Wolfram's work initiated is starting revolutions in a remarkable range of areas of science, technology--and the arts. WolframTones is an experiment in applying Wolfram's discoveries to the creation of music.

At the core of A New Kind of Science is the idea of exploring a new abstract universe: a "computational universe" of simple programs. In A New Kind of Science, Wolfram shows how remarkably simple programs in his "computational universe" capture the essence of the complexity--and beauty--of many systems in nature.

WolframTones works by taking simple programs from Wolfram's computational universe, and using music theory and Mathematica algorithms to render them as music. Each program in effect defines a virtual world, with its own special story--and WolframTones captures it as a musical composition.

It's all original music--fresh from "mining" Wolfram's computational universe. Sometimes it's reminiscent of familiar musical styles; sometimes it's like nothing ever heard before. But from just the tiniest corner of the computational universe WolframTones can make everyone on Earth their own unique cellphone ringtone. It's a taste of what it's like to explore the computational universe--and a hint what's to come...

Tip of the hat to SlashDot.

HeroicStories

HeroicStories is a free mailing list and web site whose motto is "Restoring faith in humanity, one story at a time..." I've subscribed to it from near it's inception. Click on the link above and add yourself; you'll thank me for it.

Each time the latest edition arrives in my inbox, I get a little frisson of good feelings, knowing that I'm about to read another story about my fellow humans behaving in an admirable way. Don't seem to get enough of that from the usual news sources.

Edition #632 just hit my inbox, and (as expected) it delivered another uplifting story. This time it was about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. An excerpt:

In a really rough neighborhood, we came across five seemingly unsavory characters, one with gunshot wound scars. We found them at a recreational center, one of the few two-story buildings around. They broke into the center, then gathered as many people as possible from the neighborhood.

They stayed outside in the center all day, helping people into rescue boats. We approached them at 6:30 p.m., obviously one of the last trips of the day. Yet instead of getting in our boat, they sent us further into the neighborhood to get more people out of homes and off rooftops.

These five were on the last boat out at sundown. They were incredibly grateful, repeating "God is going to bless y'all for this". One even offered us his Allen Iverson jersey, perhaps the most valuable possession among them. We declined, but understood the depth of his gesture.

HeroicStories was founded by the talented Randy Cassingham (of ThisIsTrue fame), but is now published by Joyce Schowalter, who's carrying on the tradition most excellently.

A Break

In Jamul (south-central San Diego County) we have had weeks of absolutely unrelenting sunshine, dry air, and heat — in the high 90s or low 100s (°F) every afternoon. Today it looks like we're going to get a break. The upper chart (at right) shows the temperature (red line, left scale) and humidity (green line, right scale) for the past week. Note that these are 60 minute running averages, so some of the peaks and valleys are smoothed out. You can see that our temperatures have been following a pretty stable pattern, with a slight dip yesterday — but today, a major drop. Debi and I took a nice walk up the hill next to our property, and it was a crisp 49 °F and misty as we trekked — very pleasant walking weather. The dogs loved it, too (especially when we spooked a barn owl out of an oak, and it swooped down within a few feet of us on its way out).

The lower image at right shows solar radiation (basically, how bright the sun was) for the past week. It's been day after day of absolutely perfect, cloudless days. Hot. Dry. Bright. Hot. But this morning (the rightmost little piece of that line) it was different — instead of zooming nearly straight up (indicating very bright sunlight as soon as the sun pops up over the horizon), it's kind of drifting upwards. This is because (as I look out the window) we have a fairly thick layer of mist shielding us from our local star. This probably won't last more than an hour or two, but it means that the total energy deposited on us today by the sun will be considerably reduced — and unless a hot wind blows in from the desert, that means that our peak temperature will also be reduced, perhaps in the 80s (°F).

As usual, click on the images for a bigger view. These came from the web page for my weather station.

Tolkachev

The CIA's unclassified web site has a very interesting article about a cold war spy named A. G. Tolkachev, a Soviet citizen who volunteered to provide information to the U.S. He provided voluminous and detailed information — some of the most valuable received by U.S. — for years, but was finally caught and executed for high treason.

I found this article through a post on Bruce Schneier's excellent blog, which has long been on my daily reading list. He cites the descriptions of "tradecraft" as particularly interesting, and indeed they are. But also interesting is what a hard time Tolkachev had in getting the Americans to engage with him (he spent many months in repeated attempts before he was finally successful). Once engaged, he was incredibly tenacious and brave even in the face of possible detection, arrest, and (likely) execution. An excerpt:

When Tolkachev’s written notes from this meeting were processed, however, the CIA officers involved in the case were stunned to read that a serious security threat to the agent had occurred the previous spring—one that had frightened him to the point where he had been convinced that he would be arrested at any moment.

In his note, Tolkachev said that a major security investigation had been conducted in his office in April 1983, apparently regarding possible leaks of classified information about a particular Soviet fighter aircraft target-recognition system. Tolkachev said that security personnel in his institute had requested on a priority basis a list of all personnel having access to information on this subject. Because Tolkachev had passed information on this system to the CIA the previous month, he was convinced that any leak would almost certainly be traced back to him.

Tolkachev wrote that, after having been informed of this investigation, he had asked for the next day off. He had driven to a dacha, taking all of his espionage paraphernalia—including his SRAC unit, Pentax camera, and deaddrop and signal site instructions—as well as the books and money that had been passed to him. [4] At the dacha, he had burned everything that would burn. He had thrown the remaining charred metal parts out of the car on the drive back into Moscow.

At that point, Tolkachev said that he had started carrying everywhere with him a poison pill that he had obtained. He reasoned that the most likelyscenario for his arrest would be a call to his boss’s office, at which point he would be seized. As a result, for the next several days, any time he was called to this office, he first placed the poison pill under his tongue, so that if seized he could immediately bite it. Given these circumstances, wrote Tolkachev, he would have to stand down on any document photography for the time being. He said, however, that he would continue to provide written information about sensitive documents.

Tokachev's story is an amazing tale of bravery, determination, and moral force. It's a longish read, but well worth it. Makes me wonder what other gems might up up on that CIA site...

Rhea

The Cassini probe, continuing its long-term mission to explore the Saturn system, has recently returned this spectacular photo of Saturn's small moon Rhea. From the Cassini official web site:

Saturn's moon Rhea is an alien ice world, but in this frame-filling view it is vaguely familiar. Here, Rhea's cratered surface looks in some ways similar to our own Moon, or the planet Mercury. But make no mistake -- Rhea's icy exterior would quickly melt if this moon were brought as close to the Sun as Mercury. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.

Instead, Rhea preserves a record of impacts at its post in the outer solar system. The large impact crater at the center left (near the terminator or boundary between day and night), called Izanagi, is just one of the numerous large impact basins on Rhea.

This view shows principally Rhea's southern polar region, centered on 58 degrees South, 265 degrees West.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 1, 2005, at a distance of approximately 255,000 kilometers (158,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 62 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) per pixel.

As usual, click on the photo for a larger view.

This mission is returning excellent science work every day. Mankind's knowledge of our neighbors has been expanded tremendously by robotic explorers: the many Mars missions, Galileo's explorations of the Jupiter system, and now Cassini-Huygens and its explorations of the Saturn system. Often these missions last for many years, even decades, and thus fade from the public's view. It's a source of continuing frustration for me that a manned "adventure" like the scientifically useless International Space Station can always gather more public interest and support than these relatively cheap and far more scientifically productive robotic missions.

Sigh.