Category Archives: Grim Meathook World

Quick Hits

Item 1: We are so living in the future now, says William Gibson:

Say it’s midway through the final year of the first decade of the 21st Century. Say that, last week, two things happened: scientists in China announced successful quantum teleportation over a distance of ten miles, while other scientists, in Maryland, announced the creation of an artificial, self-replicating genome. In this particular version of the 21st Century, which happens to be the one you’re living in, neither of these stories attracted a very great deal of attention.

But don’t just rely on the excerpted graph! There’s a lot more — about the nature of science fiction (in particular, and fiction in general), about the way that Gibsons novels have evolved over time, and about the idea that the future isn’t going to be The Future!! anymore but rather just the future, with stuff followed by more stuff followed by more stuff. This is, in essence, the basis of the grim meathook future, which still contains the best description I’ve ever heard of the future: “it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.” (via)

Item 2: I’m always amazed at the willingness of people to whine about air travel. (“A flight attendant on my last flight didn’t smile at me, am I entitled to compensation?”) So with that in mind, the good folks at the AAdvantage forum presentthe stupidest, most inconsequential thread ever. By design. It’s a thing of beauty.

Item 3: I wasn’t aware there was a point behind Van Halen’s infamous demands about brown M&Ms. It turns out there was a very good point, and who ever knew David Lee Roth was so sneaky?

Item 4: Depressed? Angry? Bored? As your attorney in this matter, I strongly advise you to ensure you get your daily dose of adorable assed animals. You will thank me later.

A very British apocalypse, part II

(See also part I.)

It turns out there was a prequel to Protect and Survive. Much to my joy, they’re available on YouTube (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7), and they’re even creepier than Protect and Survive was.

Also in related British apocalypse news:

  • BBC Radio 4 did a truly excellent program back in December about Britain’s nuclear deterrent and the mechanisms of command and control. You can’t listen to the program on their Web site anymore, and I can’t seem to find any of their supporting documents, but some kind soul has preserved the MP3 of the program off-site; I can’t recommend it highly enough.
  • This guy’s YouTube channel is a fantastic collection of British cold war films, and includes all of Protect and Survive, the Civil Defence Information Bulletins referenced above, and a few other things, including this semi-satirical look at PIFs featuring none other than Jeremy Clarkson (and a very bad laugh track).

Some days I truly love the Internet.

Ahhh.

After 6+ months of letting it pile up in my mailbox, I have managed to reduce my “unread, unsorted, and unreplied-to” collection of e-mail from 3,651 messages to 0. Okay, I had to vaporize a bunch of mailing list traffic I probably didn’t care about to do it, but I’m all caught up, and Thunderbird will no longer taunt me with the “hey, lazy bastard!” counter on the left side of my screen. Thank god.

Note to self: Having a Blackberry is great, in that you keep on top of the e-mail you care about. Reading threads on NANOG, on the ‘berry, is not so much fun. So maybe think about how to deal with that problem.

But, hey! I found an interesting gem in my inbox, and it was only from late in April! Yes! Timeliness, thy name is LiT! Brazillians hack US Navy satellites. It’s like Captain Midnight, but 1,000 times cooler.

Quick hits

There’s new 365 content up at Flickr. It pains me to say this, but using Flickr for this project is about 900,000,000 easier than maintaining it locally. So Flickr is where things will stay. Facebook, however, is not in the cards — so stop it, guys.

Must-read blog entry of the day: Five basic questions about the North Korea Crisis probably has the highest information-to-length ratio of anything else you’re going to run into out there during the current 24-hour cycle.

The creepiest parallels

Jack Hitt wrote a fabulous article in Rolling Stone last month about missile defense, made all the more fabulous because it contained information relating to a defense or aerospace project that was new to me. As they say, read the whole thing. If you’re like me, though, and have spent a significant portion of your life around computers and the open source movement, the most striking this about this article is the horror you’ll feel when you realize that the United States Department of Defense has adopted the CADT model of weapons system development.

I’m not joking. Hitt might as well have been writing about any large scale OSS project:

This kind of thinking does wonders for the speed with which you can deploy weapons. Take the shield’s interceptor missiles. In the old way of building things, a few missiles would have been built and tested repeatedly until it was clear they could reliably launch, sync up with central command, interact with radar, intercept a test missile that shrouded itself in decoys, make the necessary discriminations and blow the proper target from the sky. But under the new way of building things, all you have to do is have the whole thing worked out on paper, in simulated computer run-throughs and a few limited real-world tests. That’s why fields of interceptor missiles are already up and, in a capability-based way, running in both Alaska and California.

Of course, the “deploy now, test later” approach has its drawbacks. During a 2005 run, the interceptor couldn’t get out of the silo because the retraction arm — which hadn’t been tested properly in real-world conditions — didn’t fully retract, causing the entire system to shut down. In the old knowledge-based world, that probably would have been worked out before deployment. But in the capability-based world, each interceptor had to be removed, a new retractor system designed and installed, and the interceptors put back into the silos. …

If the old question was whether or not the technology worked — and it still has not been satisfactorily answered — there now appears to be a new question: Even if the technology is found to work, given the current schedule, will missile defense be fully operational anytime in the next half-century? …

That’s not the best part, though:

Last year, three weeks of heavy rain did what no invading army could pull off: It penetrated Fort Greely’s defenses and took out a quarter of the missiles. The silos and the electronics vaults adjacent to them were flooded — one silo was filled with sixty-three feet of water. Boeing blames the military, the military blames Boeing. According to the Missile Defense Agency, it is not cost-effective to repair the damage. Moreover, it is now considered too dangerous to work near missiles in the undamaged silos. The latest budget has a line in it to start from scratch: The government plans to build a completely new field of twenty missiles.

Tell me there’s a difference between this mentality and:

This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch — and the new maintainer can’t be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.

Let’s see. Obsession with new and shiny stuff? Check! Belief that technology will conquer all? Check! More interested in releasing product than actually having a product that works? Check! Complaints from other developers about fundamental flaws in methodology unsound ignored? Check! Poorly articulated design goals with no clear roadmap to achieve those goals? Check! Wow, that’s really disturbing — the new and improved Department of Defense really does look like a CADT software project.

I weep, but I don’t know why.

(We will, for the sake of politeness, ignore the geopolitical implications of missile defense. Gwynne Dyer had it right almost a generation ago: “Star Wars won’t help people survive, only missiles.” The issue isn’t — and has never been — one of defending friendly lives, but ensuring that American weapons can be delivered without fear of retaliation; back in the cold war this was more about preventing a counterforce first-strike, today it probably has more to do with having the ability to blow the shit out of Tehran or Pyongyang without worrying a hidden launch site might get overlooked.

On a totally unrelated note, Jack Hitt is a fantastic writer who desperately needs a frickin’ Web site or something so he can point to his latest articles and say, “hey, go read!”)

Hey! iPhone fanboys! Over here!

This is a really good question:

I don’t understand why Apple made the iPhone deal with AT&T, since AT&T is – and I’m just going to say this [-] the company rightly most notorious for giving the worst people in the federal government an extra-legal spinal tap into our communications systems as part of project so massively unconstitutional and, almost certainly, abused, that lawsuits by the ACLU and EFF can’t even penetrate the protective layers of paranoia that protect it from disclosure. …

AT&T won’t see another dollar in my life unless it’s drawn involuntarily from me. But I’m obviously not in good company. How many people have contributed to EFF and bought an iPhone? How can the early adopters, the people how are most eager to see the future, see the beauty in the gadget and not the ugliness inherent in their purchase? How can people camp out, looking forward to a product that won’t happen, and not see what happens when privacy comes at only at the discretion of the least ethical credentialed federal agent? How can you spend money to be guaranteed that your every communication through that device is being monitored?

Yeah! (pumps fists)

Updating the list

I note, in the wake of Monday’s carnage, that there are a number of things the Blogosphere has magically become an expert on:

  • Wound ballistics
  • Weapon performance
  • Urban/close-quarters battle tactics
  • Unarmed self-defense against armed maniacs

Will wonders never cease? I have this image in my head of Dick Cheney having another jammer and the merits of the various treatment options suddenly becoming politicized and everyone having an opinion on whether primary PCI is better than facilitated PCI is better than a thrombolytic strategy alone, with certain blogs who shall remain unidentified talking about the economics of each and..

Oh, screw it. This makes my head hurt.

On related notes:

  1. Anyone who says that a .22 is a nothing gun —

    And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren’t bad.

    — is a total idiot and knows absolutely nothing about wound ballistics. I know that the .22 LR is not anything near a sexy round, nor does it possess anything close to the ideal amount of that mythical thing called stopping power, but unless you’ve had to chase one of those projectiles around the body, you don’t get to say that “your chances aren’t bad.” A .22 that gets into the body is in there for the grand tour, unlike a 9mm that’s likely to mushroom and expand, or a rifle round that’s going to go flying through leaving a nice, clean wound track. Projectiles are projectiles — throw it fast enough and it’s dangerous. Guess what, kids? .22 is plenty dangerous. (I should hope that the fact that a .22 needs to find something important to do damage crossed with the fact that the round is in there for the grand tour is not something you would take solace in, but that’s just me.)

    I’m going to totally ignore the rest of that masturbatory post. The crack about the .22 is enough.

  2. The comments from Old Jarhead need to be tattooed on everyone’s eyelids. I like guns. I’ve owned guns. I’ve fired a lot of rounds in my life. I feel very comfortable around firearms. I do not want a concealed carry permit and I do not want a firearm for defensive purposes in my house because of this fundamental truth: I am not 100% convinced I could drop the hammer. That makes me a liability, not an asset, when it comes to dealing with armed maniacs. It’s not manly of me, but it is who I am, and I’m not willing to lie to myself to say otherwise. What’s the point? We all want to be Rambo; almost none of us are. There’s no shame in this.
  3. I think the whole gun issue would be a lot saner and less idiotic if the people who were seriously trying to argue one position or the other had been to the Lethal Force Institute, or at least read about Massad Ayoob. Chris Wright wrote a fantastic article about LFI and Ayoob for the Boston Phoenix a few years back, and some of Ayoob’s ideas about guns and self defense seem far too rational to come from this world:

    The 51-year-old Ayoob is something of a celebrity in the gun community. In 1980, he published In the Gravest Extreme, a book that quickly came to be known as the definitive study on the tactical, legal, and ethical issues surrounding the use of lethal force by civilians. Twenty years after its publication, the book has sold about 300,000 copies.

    In all, Ayoob has written a dozen books — The Truth About Self-Protection, Stressfire, Hit the White Part — plus countless articles for gun periodicals. He has been an expert witness in about 70 criminal trials. He has taught in Switzerland and South America, England and Africa. He has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the National Enquirer. He has appeared on Frontline, 20/20, and the Today show.

    “He’s a celebrity among thinking gun owners,” says Miami criminal-defense lawyer Jeffrey Weiner, former president of the National Association of Criminal Lawyers and an LFI grad. “He’s not a celebrity among macho types.” …

    Following another burst of laughter, Ayoob’s deadly serious again. “There are no first-place winners in a shooting situation,” he warns us. “When it’s over, believe me, you haven’t won. Deterrence is the only victory.”

    In many ways, LFI isn’t a class in killing people. It’s a class in not killing them. Ayoob finds himself in the curious position of believing the best way to prevent gun violence is to teach people how to commit it. His entire lethal-force philosophy hinges on a single principle: the more prepared you are to kill an assailant, the less likely you are to have to.

    This may sound a bit nutty at first, but perhaps the only way to get to the heart of a matter as complex as gun ownership is through paradox. In an issue that many people view in black-and-white terms, Ayoob’s pacifism-through-violence philosophy has made him as many enemies as it has friends.

    “I’ve found myself caught in the middle of a very polarized debate,” he says. “On one side I’ve got the hard-core anti-gunners. To them I’m a crypto-fascist because I tell women that if a rapist attacks you, killing the son of a bitch is absolutely one of your options — legally and morally. On the other side there’s the hard-core right-wing ultra-gunnies, who consider me a crypto-commie because I tell them, ‘No, as a matter of fact, you don’t have a God-given right to carry a loaded gun in shopping malls where there are kids walking around. It’s a privilege, and you need to be able show society that you know how to use it and when to use it. That you’re not going to shoot at a perpetrator and hit a kid by mistake.’ I think that’s a reasonable request.

    “In the history of polarized debates,” he adds, “anybody in the middle find himself in a very lonely place.” …

    “Civilians chasing criminals are like dogs chasing cars: they have no idea what to do with them when they catch them.” That is: if they run, let them go. If it’s a robbery, give them the money. If you’re armed and someone comes up and spits in your face, walk away. If you hear a noise in your house, hide yourself in a safe room and call the police — never go looking for intruders.

    When in doubt, don’t shoot.

    “I can’t believe I spent $600 for that ugly little Ay-rab to tell me I can’t shoot anyone,” says Ayoob.

    It’s weird and it doesn’t make a lot of sense, and yet it makes all kinds of sense. Help me out here.

See Dick run from radioactive death

So there’s a new radiation warning symbol. (See also here; previous link is non-specific.) It’s this thing:



Why do we need a new radiation warning symbol?

The trefoil symbol has no inherent meaning and only those people that have been educated in its meaning have knowledge that it represents the presence of ionizing radiation. The new symbol is the completion of a multi-year effort by the IAEA to develop a universal radiation warning symbol that anyone anywhere will understand the message of “Danger- Stay Away”.

And this brings up an interesting point about symbols — they have no intrinsic meaning in and of themselves. Even the skull and crossbones doesn’t really mean anything; we assume that it is a good representation of death and destruction, but anyone who’s done poison education can tell you that some kids will see it and think, “Oooh, pirates!” (To be fair, I know some adults who will think the same thing, too.) Hence, Mr. Yuk comes into existence (deeply messed-up video also available). It’s debatable whether Mr. Yuk works better than the skull and crossbones, but he was designed by committee, so you tell me.

It’s worth taking a peek at this discussion of the development of the biohazard warning symbol. The creators wanted something memorable, yet totally meaningless in and of itself, so as to be able to educate people in its meaning later. Educated, the biohazard symbol manages to convey the idea that “something nearby will fuck you and/or your offspring up in a disturbingly organic manner,” and that’s probably a good thing. But would it carry the same message to someone who had never seen it before? I doubt it.

The trefoil has been around since 1946. Some of the design considerations were pretty interesting:

The first signs printed at Berkeley had a magenta (Martin Senour Roman Violet No. 2225) symbol on a blue background. In an earlier letter written in 1948, Garden explained why this particular shade of magenta color was selected: “it was distinctive and did not conflict with any color code that we were familiar with. Another factor in its favor was its cost. . . The high cost will deter others from using this color promiscuously.” Explaining the blue background, he said, “The use of a blue background was selected because there is very little blue color used in most of the areas where radioactive work would be carried out.”

Garden did not like yellow as a background: “the very fact that . . . the high visibility yellow stands out most prominently has led to extensive use of this color and it is very common.” To compensate for the lower visibility of the blue, Garden even toyed with the idea of including diagonal white stripes across the sign.

Despite Garden’s view to the contrary, most workers felt that a blue background was a poor choice. Blue was not supposed to be used on warning signs, and it faded, especially outdoors. The use of yellow was standardized at Oak Ridge National Lab in early 1948. At that time, Bill Ray and George Warlick, both working for K.Z. Morgan, were given the task of coming up with a more suitable warning sign, a blue background being too unacceptable. Ray traveled to Berkeley and picked up a set of their signs. Back in Oak Ridge, Ray and Warlick had their graphics people cut out the magenta symbols and staple them on cards of different colors. Outdoors, and at a distance of 20 feet, a committee selected the magenta on yellow as the best combination.

Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something funny about physicists arguing about color choices.

Note that in both cases, the guys designing the symbols were not trying to make something that would be intuitively obvious to someone who had never seen it before — they were counting on the ability to education potential warnees about the dangers posted, either from radiation or biological activity. With education you can do more or less whatever you want (consider the European hazard symbols, some of which aren’t terribly helpful unless you know what’s going on). A vastly different problem occurs when you’re trying to warn naive people away from stuff, and that’s where the new symbol comes into play.

The intention is to put this symbol on equipment (sources, generating devices, etc) such that it only becomes obvious when the equipment is disassembled — it’s not a general purpose warning (and, indeed, it would fail miserably at that task since it seems to imply not just that there’s danger, but that there’s danger and that you should leave, now). The goal would be to prevent a repeat of something like the Goiania accident, where naive individuals inadvertently contaminated themselves with Cs-137. (Incidentally, the IAEA’s report into Goiania should be mandatory reading to anyone who wants to talk seriously about radiological terrorism, but that’s another post for another day.) What’s interesting about the new symbol is that I don’t have that visceral reaction to seeing it that I think the IAEA thinks I should — although I understand its message perfectly and know exactly what it means. That said, they’ve apparently tested the snot out of it, and are apparently happy with the message it communicates, and they’re smarter than I am, so I defer to their expert judgment.

No discussion about naive warnings in this journal would be complete without me bringing up what has become quite possibly my favorite long-term problem: Marking the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant so that humans from the future stay the hell out:

* This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
* Sending this message was impotant to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
* This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
* What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
* The danger is in a particular location… it increases toward a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
* The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
* The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
* The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
* The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

The excerpts capture the spirit well, but if you’re truly interested in the topic and have some time to kill, the full 351 page report from Sandia is worth a read too. I find the whole thing to be deeply fascinating: How do you communicate with your own species across time? How to you ensure understanding? How do you ensure survival? The fact that we’re even thinking about it makes me proud as a human.

I check back on this every year or so, to see if there are new developments or changes to the plan as written. The last new thing I saw was the implementation plan for the permanent markers, which sets up a bunch of timetables and discusses where they’re at in terms of preparing to mark the site. I hope they finish it, and that I live long enough to see what they’ve done.

The War for Terra

There has got to be something wrong with me.

For the past year or so, I’ve been finding that I’ve been paying a lot more attention to stories about climate change — and then trying to act on the ideas in them. I bought a much more fuel efficient car, for instance. I don’t drive nearly as much as I used to. I turn down the heat (not that this matters much, since I have electric heating, and electricity in BC is essentially carbon-neutral). Elizabeth Kolbert’s magnificent reporting for the New Yorker has been a powerful tool for influencing me, but I think the real credit belongs to Terri Schiavo.

L’affaire Schiavo demonstrated many things, among them the depths of depravity some politicians will sink, but the one that really stuck in my craw was the absolute certainty of people who have no idea what they’re talking about. It was galling — truly, madly, infuriatingly galling — to watch non-physicians, non-neurologists, and people who’d never once cared for a PVS patient (or anyone else that was comatose, for that matter) explain how Terri was clearly not brain dead, and how she could wake up under some circumstances. I think this exchange captures it quite nicely; I’m not going to re-hash it again, because it will just make me very very sad.

You saw a lot of this with the Schiavo case, but you see it everywhere else science comes into conflict with articles of faith: Parents who think thiomersal (or the MMR vaccine, or anything else) gave their kids autism will never, ever listen to the evidence that said it doesn’t cause problems; anti-vaccination activists will kick and scream and cry bloody murder before they ever admit that maybe vaccines are useful. Creationists will shout to the heavens that something created the universe and that evolutionary biology is bunk, despite not knowing the first thing about evolutionary biology. It goes on and on and on, and every single time, I end up siding with the people who have the data to support their position, and not just random accusations of conspiracies. Laypeople (a polite word, really, for “idiots”) arguing with experts over expert subject matter makes me want to tear my hair out; we’ve reached a point where the fact that you know a lot about something no longer grants you special status in discussions about that thing; you are now subject to argument from people whose knowledge may range from zero to near-parity, and you are expected to take them all seriously. (See my comment in the above-linked Schiavo journalism story about Buzz Aldrin arguing with moon-landing skeptics.)

Which brings us to climate change.

For many years, I was in deep denial about climate change. I didn’t think it was real, didn’t find the evidence persuasive. I argued that it was too early to suggest that human behavior was causing all these weird things. I pointed at solar output variation, at the fear of global cooling as recently as 30 years ago (the causes of and cures for which were essentially the same as today’s proposed causes and solutions), at the dramatic effects Earth itself has on its own atmosphere. Part of this was a reaction to the hippies that dominated the environmental movement in the later 1980s and early 1990s, but part of it was my own healthy skepticism of certainty — or so I told myself.

And then, one day, about a year and a half ago, I found myself staring at a joint position statement from the national academies and societies of the G8 that explicitly endorsed the idea that anthropogenic climate change was occurring, and that we needed to do something about it. I started to argue in my head, and then I stopped. “Wait a minute. I am arguing with the Royal Society of Canada, among others. These are supposed to be the best and brightest scientific minds of our era. They know more about this subject than I do. Who the hell am I to argue with them?” Just as I would be annoyed with a climatologist who decided he knew what the best management strategy is for STEMI patients, I was getting annoyed with myself for arguing in opposition to people who, quite simply, know more than I do. There is, in other words, such a thing as expert opinion. It has spoken, and who am I to argue with it? I don’t have standing to argue.

With that realization I turned 180 degrees and started worrying about it. And today I took another small step: I bought myself and my 5.1L/100km Acura a TerraPass, I bought enough credits to cover all the flying I’ve done in the last twelve months, and I’ve vowed that I’m going to make sure I buy credits to offset the future air travel I do. (I’d buy one for the house but virtually all of the heating is electric and, as I said, electricity in BC is almost entirely hydro-generated, so it’s not making the climate problem worse.) I’m not fooling myself: This by itself is not going to save the planet.

But it’s a step in the right direction.

And for me, personally, it’s a kind of penance.