Gray Watson's Blog -- September 2004

I've found that blogging is a useful way for me to record my thoughts and digital travels every so often.

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September 29, 2004   

• Just to mark the date. Today the Scaled Composites team successfully flew their SpaceShipOne vehicle up to 100km on the first leg of their attempt to win the X-Prize. I've documented my trip out in the Mojave dessert to see the flight. Lots of fun!

  The PA announced that it was close to the drop time and that it was to the North East at around 15 degrees off the horizon but we still were looking far too high when the rocket trail was first spotted around 08:12. It was really cool looking at SpaceShipOne streak upwards through the binoculars. It would have been hard to follow with something with higher resolution. You couldn't see the ship itself but the rocket burn and the resulting smoke trail were very visible.

September 27, 2004   

• A scary article about the report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the US Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. Boy did they really screw it up. The big question is how it happened and why. A lot of fingers point to the administrations need for the excuse to go to war but the committee was unable to find specific evidence that Bush and friends put direct pressure on the analysts. Still damning and awful.
• Virgin Airlines is licensing Burt Rutan and Paul Allen's SpaceShipOne technology to offer commerical space flights. Virgin plans on licensing $25 million of technology from Mohave Aerospace Ventures over 15 years and spending $100 million in spaceships and ground infrastructure on the project.

September 24, 2004   

• Here's a funny movie clip about some gorilla politics with the US Post Office.
• Wow. This dude has hacked up a 2.7 terabytes storage array running on his Macintosh which uses Serial ATA (SATA) cards to get 575mb/sec. That's 575mb/sec real speed from a user level process running HD video capture. Wow.
• Some good and appropriate war posters taking on Bush. The problem with most of them is that it doesn't give anyone a good reason to switch sides.

September 23, 2004   

• Just found this incredible quote from Hermann Goering, Hitler's 2nd in command, given to an interviewer during his trial at Nuremberg. It is exactly what has happened since 9/11 and continues to echo during the current presidential campaign with statements like "if you vote for Kerry, we are going to be attacked".

  Of course the people don't want war. [...] But, after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. [...] Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.

• Another article from Salon.com right on the money as they talk about how Bush is not a true conservative.

  There are few programs at which the president has not thrown money; he has supported massive farm subsidies, an expensive new Medicare drug benefit, thousands of pork barrel projects, dubious homeland security grants, an expansion of Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps, and new foreign aid programs. What's more, says former conservative Republican Rep. Bob Barr, "in the midst of the war on terror and $500 billion deficits, [Bush] proposes sending spaceships to Mars."

• Take a look at this satellite image of Pensacola Florida after Hurricane Ivan. Once and a while Mother Nature stands up and tells us what sort of little insignificant critters we really are.
• Here's another example of a poor system design using the Windows operating system. Then again, maybe any use is poor. Thank the powers that be that it happened in a unimportant system -- just Southern California's air traffic control.

  The failure was ultimately down to a combination of human error and a design glitch in the Windows servers brought in over the past three years to replace the radio system's original Unix servers, according to the FAA. The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times. To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every 30 days. An improperly trained employee failed to reset the system, leading it to shut down without warning, the official said. Backup systems failed because of a software failure, according to a report in The New York Times.

• Good article by Car and Driver when they hold the Frugalympics and test 4 fuel efficient cars. The Honda Civic Hybrid (which I have) won, slightly edging the Prius.
• New book entitled What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Sounds like an interesting book about sad, pathetic, and stomach wrenching topic.

  Hermann Goering famously told an interviewer during his trial at Nuremberg that "people don't want to go to war.... But, after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship.... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country."

• In doing some research today, I found out that reporters have talked to some of the people whom the FBI claims were the 9/11 hijackers. They think that the hijackers stole identities from people and that the FBI may not know who the perps actually are.

  [Waleed Al Shehri] acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring. But, he says, he left the United States in September last year, became a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines and is currently on a further training course in Morocco.

• Possibly the fastest speeding ticket every given was given out by the Minnesota State Police on the 18th after clocking a motorcycle doing (wait for it) 205 mph (328 kph). Congrats dude!

  The State Patrol officer arrested the faster rider, 20-year-old Stillwater resident Samuel Armstrong Tilley, for reckless driving, driving without a motorcycle license -- and driving 140 miles per hour over the posted speed limit of 65 mph.

September 22, 2004   

• The former singer Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam, has been detained and denied entry into the United States. Sounds like the terrorist watch lists are really a disaster for a lot of innocent people. I can only hope that it is helping keep some of the bad guys out as well.
• I love the Register's headlines. This one is entitled Sun does dancing bear act for Wall Street about Sun's latest marketing moves for the Street. I've been fortelling Sun's doom for far too long now. They continue to surprise me that they are still in business. They are only postponing the inevitable however.
• I've been very happy with the Simple Web Indexing System for Humans or Swish indexing utility. It is what drives the search boxes on my pages. The program seems to work well, it has a lot of nice plugins, and seems well featured.

September 21, 2004   

• As always, Cryptome is an awesome site with an incredible amount of content. This guy is really in the trenches. For example, here's his accounting of the dead from the Iraq war.
• Here's an interesting project which overlay TCP with an anonymizing layer. It basically provides and anonymous layer on top of TCP which givens some degree of security. Looks like it's in its infancy but holds promise.
• Very nice periodic table where you can click on the elements to get lots of information.
• Interesting speech given by Bill Moyers at a Society of Professional Journalists conference on 9/11/2004.

  I believe democracy requires 'a sacred contract' between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.

• 

  Found this gem in one of my email folders. At the 2002 Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference Stephen Petranek of Discover presented the 10 most likely ways the Earth could end in the near future:

  10. We lose the will to survive (depression being the #1 mental illness)
  9. Aliens invade Earth (most primitive civilizations do not survive outside contact)
  8. Our Ecosystem collapses (e.g. we destroy the marginal tree in the rain forest or run out of fish)
  7. Particle accelerator mishap - when we can make devices powerful enough to make black holes we expect them to evaporate, but we can't be sure.
  6. Biotech disaster
  5. Reversal of Earth's magnetic field
  4. Solar flares
  3. Global epidemic
  2. Rogue black hole
  1. Asteroid collision

  Petranek pointed out that the chances of dying from an asteroid collision are 1 in 20,000 -- about the same as a plane crash.

• Found this scary story about a teacher who carried a bookmark through airport security. It is a US$10 bookmark weighted at both ends and was deemed to be a dangerous weapon. She was put in handcuffs and thrown into a holding cell crying. Sometimes the letter of the law is just ridiculous. Uh, oh. It looks like you can buy one of these awful weapons online!!
• So another good day in Bob's world. This guy is amazing. He puts out these fascinating pieces every weekend or so about various interesting topics. One of the fascinating bits on that page is how the theory of Einstein's General Relativity was again proven after they launched the first GPS satellites back in 1970. They estimated and determined that the Cesium clocks on board, whose time is critical to the GPS system operation, would slow by 7 nanoseconds per day because of they are traveling at a higher speed than earth. If not corrected, this would have resulted in an positional error of more than a mile per day.

September 20, 2004   

• Disappointing interview with Dan Rather in England.

  In June 2002, Dan Rather looked old, defeated, making a confession he dare not speak on American TV about the deadly censorship -- and self-censorship -- which had seized US newsrooms. After September 11, news on the US tube was bound and gagged. Any reporter who stepped out of line, he said, would be professionally lynched as un-American.

• Just read this cool story from Reuters on how some deaf students in Nicaragua invented their own language. They were given no formal sign language instruction so started talking to each other. Shows the power of the human spirit.
• Here's a very sad article about some 1,072 pound man who's trying to lose enough weight to get down to 300 pounds and be "healthy" enough to have stomach-stapling surgery. This guy had to have an enabler. There is no way he could move so someone had to be pooring the fat, carbs, and sugar into him day after day.
• Interesting picture of one of the Pittsburgh highway that often is covered with water. When it rains hard (courtesy of recent hurricanes) the waters of the 3 rivers surrounding Pittsburgh swell. They know exactly how high they can let it go and close all of the damns upstream as a buffer. I worked on a farm up near Kitanning, PA for a couple of summers, and they would close the damn in the valley and a 2 mile drive would turn into a 45 minute trip after the primary bridge went under water.
• Couple ideas for automatic determination of whether a user is a human or robot. Need to roll one of these into mailnull webmail scripts.

September 17, 2004   

• Just found out that the new movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was shot entirely in front of blue screens with the background filled in later by computers. How much longer until the actors are completely replaced? I can see the strikes and strife by the actors union right now.
• Just found a piece of someone's mbox on the web that has a number of my close friends' email address in it. The spamming robots must love it. That's the reason why I put a legal statement at the bottom of my mail. I want to have some recourse in case someone posts something online that they shouldn't. I also use disposable email addresses for everything and use mailnull.com liberally.
• Wow. They are still finding pieces of Columbia space shuttle down in Texas. A piece of the crew compartment with a hinged window was found by a wildlife biologist.

September 16, 2004   

• Posted one of my longer Thoughts pieces entitled God Bless America.
• This is one of these news stories which just hurts. The "war is lost". Exactly like I feared.

  Military experts say they see no exit from the Iraq debacle -- and that the war is helping al-Qaida.

September 15, 2004   

• Yet another security problem with Microsoft windows. This time it's a doosey. The flaw is in its handling of jpeg images meaning that Windows users could fall prey to an attack just by visiting a Web site that has affected images. Nice!!
• Interesting article about Sun's zsh filesystem. Pretty impressive stats: 128bit, self healing, builtin checksums, total copy on write, etc., etc..
• The God FAQ. Answered all of my questions.
• Picture editorializing really pisses me off. With titles and pictures editors easily warp user expectations for a story, often without any evidence or reason. Here's a good one. You know that Reuters got a better pictures of Arnold here but they choose this one for their "file photo". It's even more unfortunate that this picture is associated with the following text:

  Having sex with corpses is now officially illegal in California after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill barring necrophilia.

• Wow!! Check out this cool manual about the Victron Energy WhisperGen. It is a diesel generator powered by a sterling heat engine. No noise, no vibration, and no fumes. If you use it to heat water too then it is 95% efficient. Might get one for our sailboat. It also might a very cool way to get off of the grid. You are still reliant on diesel fuel but something like 60-70% of the power produced by the plants is lost in the distribution and transmission lines so if power was more distributed, not only would it be more efficient but also safer. Wonder how hard a natural gas version would be.
• So I just noticed that the URL that I sent our earlier to the CNet page is something like:

  http://news.com.com/Major+IE+graphics+flaw/2100-1002_3-5366314.html

  The CNet servers look to be completely ignoring the middle path component so I could change this to

  http://news.com.com/Microsoft+security+sucks/2100-1002_3-5366314.html

  or whatever I wanted. This is for search engines which give relevancy boosts to words in the file path. Alden sees this as yet another sign of the end of search engine competence.
• More partisan information about Bush's service record.

  There is increasing evidence that Bush left his Texas Air National Guard unit in 1972 for Alabama because he was having problems piloting a fighter jet.

• The Star Wars trilogy on DVD is slated to come out next week. We're going to get it sooner or later.
• Nice fact checking site which verifies political advertisements and statements. They seem to be monitoring and reporting on fallacies on both sides of the fence.

September 14, 2004   

• Very cool zipcode applet. You type in a zipcode and it dynamically shows you the region of the country covered.
• Just found the following site: www.v-a.com. It's not a link because I don't want to give them any pagerank advantage. The content is quite distressing and very wrong at every level.

  This year's Presidential election is a crucial one for peace in the world. Heaven forbid should a Democratic candidate win this election and abandon Iraq to terrorists.

  Uh, Kerry has never said he'd abandon Iraq. Also let's remember that it was the Republicans who basically helped the terrorists to take over by destabilizing it.

  The Two-Party System has worked great for us, but the Democratic Party needs to be reformed or replaced. The liberals have destroyed the Democratic Party; they want to treat the terrorists with liberal policies.

  GASP!! Hide the kids honey, here come those dreaded "liberal policies".
• I think that a lot of the animosity towards Kerry by some of his fellow vets comes because he publicly opposed the Vietnam War. Here's an interesting exchange on the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth" site of a debate between John Kerry and John O'Neill back in 1971. It comes down to the "green wall" if you will. No one can criticize us because no one understands what it's like to fight in a war.
• I've heard that there are chemicals that do not appear naturally that now can be found almost universally in human and animal bodies. Here's one example article teflon and the PFOA chemical. It has detected in the blood of more than 90 percent of Americans and in Arctic Circle polar bears. PFOA does not occur naturally, so researchers suspect that it is being spread either in the manufacturing process or in the gradual release of the chemical from products as they age and wear out.
• Chad just forwarded me a link to toontalk, a children's programming program. Looks cool although a little advanced for Tim at age 5.
• I'm having some fun thinking about a hardware project for my sailboat. The basic stamp microcontrollers are super cool and allow you to write little hardware aps which do sensing and drive LCD or button interfaces. Weeee!

September 13, 2004   

• Scary article about how nanotechnology can fix some of our large environmental problems. We'll see. I'd just be happy if people got it through they're thick skulls that there are problems out there.

  By 2050, the world will need at least twice the current amount of energy being produced today, he said. The current consumption of energy, equivalent to 210 million barrels of oil per day, would have to be increased to at least 450 million barrels to support the world's growing population. And that energy production must not increase pollution.

  Nuclear reactors will not provide enough energy to provide for a hydrogen economy, and relying on coal would only increase the real problem of greenhouse gas emissions, Smalley noted, adding, "If you have been in C02 denial, take another look."

• Regime change. 10 things you can do to defeat Bush and save the country.

  But the simple fact remains that the election of John Kerry is the best hope we have right now. For Californians, voting Nov. 2 is absolutely crucial st in a handful of swing states -- and as Al Gore so aptly noted in his speech at the convention, every vote (every single vote) counts. Change the mind of one friend in Ohio, help register a few more Democrats in New Mexico, donate a few bucks to help a congressional challenger in Washington ... if we all do a little, we can help swing the states, and the nation, in the right direction.

• Wired article about the cost of secrecy. The current administration has created more secret documents than any other in the history of our country. Although some of this is necessary because of a heightened level of security, there is both a financial and social cost which is not being properly factored into the equation.

September 12, 2004   

• So I was traveling in Pittsburgh and did not get up the nerve to wear my Osama Bin Laden t-shirt given that it was 9/11 yesterday.

September 11, 2004   

• 3rd anniversary of 9/11. I certainly do not feel like we have made significant steps forward in terms of homeland security. Our borders are still weak and we are spending far too much money on the Iraqi war to compensate. I hope the American public is ready for the next terrorist strike.

September 10, 2004   

• Finally figured out this morning that we are approaching the anniversary of 9/11 and my 9/11 thoughts and pictures pages are getting hit pretty good. That's why my link to home has been sluggish.
• This makes me tremendously sad. Lawmakers troubled by Ghost Detainees. Why do we expect anyone else to follow the rules when we obviously don't either?

  Congress may keep up the focus on the prison abuse scandal following the disclosure that the military has concealed as many as 100 "ghost detainees" from the Red Cross.

September 9, 2004   

• Atlantic Monthly article about Bush's Lost Year.

  By deciding to invade Iraq, the Bush Administration decided not to do many other things: not to reconstruct Afghanistan, not to deal with the threats posed by North Korea and Iran, and not to wage an effective war on terror. An inventory of opportunities lost.

• Interesting article that I've enjoyed reading and passing around about the perils of rewriting code from scratch.
• Posted a first take at my newest t-shirt entitled "9/11, 15 Saudis, 0 Iraqis".
• Went to a Kerry/Edwards campaign meeting after work and I'm fired up. I'm considering taking the last 2 weeks before the election off to work full time on the campaign.
• Interesting article about Outsourcing and Patriotism. Lou Dobbs talks about how American businesses are putting their interests ahead of the national interest with the outsourcing of jobs.

September 8, 2004   

• Fascinating article about China's thirst for energy and the next generation of small "meltdown proof" reactors" they are working on.

  While the West frets about how to keep its sushi cool, hot tubs warm, and Hummers humming without poisoning the planet, the cold-eyed bureaucrats running the People's Republic of China have launched a nuclear binge right out of That '70s Show. Late last year, China announced plans to build 30 new reactors - enough to generate twice the capacity of the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam - by 2020. And even that won't be enough. The Future of Nuclear Power, a 2003 study by a blue-ribbon commission headed by former CIA director John Deutch, concludes that by 2050 the PRC could require the equivalent of 200 full-scale nuke plants.

• Very scary articles about the problems with electronic voting machines.

  In the Alabama 2002 general election, machines made by Election Systems and Software (ES&S) flipped the governorx thousand three hundred Baldwin County electronic votes mysteriously disappeared after the polls had closed and everyone had gone home. Democrat Don Siegelman's victory was handed to Republican Bob Riley, and the recount Siegelman requested was denied. Three months after the election, the vendor shrugged. "Something happened. I don't have enough intelligence to say exactly what," said Mark Kelley of ES&S.

• Cold fusion back from the grave? Looks like the DOE is going to start formally recognizing what many now call low-energy nuclear reactions.

  The Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science (SC) was approached in late 2003 by a group of scientists who requested that the Department revisit the question of scientific evidence for low energy nuclear reactions. In 1987 Pons and Fleishmann first reported the production of "excess" heat in a Pd electrochemical cell, and postulated that this was due to D-D fusion (D=deuterium), sometimes referred to as "cold fusion." The work was reviewed in 1989 by the Energy Research Advisory Board (ERAB) of the DOE. ERAB did not recommend the establishment of special programs within DOE devoted to the science of low energy fusion, but supported funding of peer-reviewed experiments for further investigations. Since 1989, research programs in cold fusion have been supported by various universities, private industry, and government agencies in several countries.

• Bush fell short on duty at Guard. I'm absolutely astonished!!

  On July 30, 1973, shortly before he moved from Houston to Cambridge, Bush signed a document that declared, ''It is my responsibility to locate and be assigned to another Reserve forces unit or mobilization augmentation position. If I fail to do so, I am subject to involuntary order to active duty for up to 24 months. . . " Under Guard regulations, Bush had 60 days to locate a new unit.

  But Bush never signed up with a Boston-area unit. In 1999, Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett told the Washington Post that Bush finished his six-year commitment at a Boston area Air Force Reserve unit after he left Houston. Not so, Bartlett now concedes. ''I must have misspoke," Bartlett, who is now the White House communications director, said in a recent interview.

• We watched on NASA-TV live as the Genesis capsule crashed into the desert today as its parachute failed to open. Ugly.

  The Genesis sample return canister was to have been plucked out of mid air by a helicopter flown by a Hollywood stunt pilot over the Utah Test and Training Range. But a drogue chute needed to stabilize the craft before deployment of its large parafoil never fired and the craft slammed into the ground at about 100 mph.

  Video showed the canister half buried in the Utah desert, largely intact. But the mid-air recovery had been planned because the system used to capture particles from the sun was exceptionally fragile and it was believed a ground landing, even under a parachute, would have caused extensive breakage.

• Justice Department Censors Supreme Court Quote.

  The Justice Department tipped its hand in its ongoing legal war with the ACLU over the Patriot Act. Because the matter is so sensitive, the Justice Dept is allowed to black out those passages in the ACLU's court filings that it feels should not be publicly released.

  Ostensibly, they would use their powers of censorship only to remove material that truly could jeopardize US operations. But in reality, what did they do? They blacked out a quotation from a Supreme Court decision:

  "The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

• I've been using gmail a bit recently. Pretty nice actually. A number of nice interface features and decisions. I don't mind their ad software looking over my shoulder. Tmcm responded: congratulations on your decision to further enable the surveillance industrial complex.
• Just bought one of these copies of the first 10 amendments printed on sturdy, pocket-sized, pieces of metal. The idea is to carry them when you travel.

  The First Ten Amendments to the constitution of the United States printed on both sides of sturdy, pocket-sized, pieces of metal. The next time you travel by air, take the Bill of Rights - Security Edition along with you. When asked to empty your pockets, proudly toss the Bill of Rights in the plastic bin. You need to get used to offering up the bill of rights for inspection and government workers enforcing the USA Patriot Act need to get used to deciding if you'll be allowed to keep the Bill of Rights with you when you travel.

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