Seeing Through It.

Conditions: Cold, Dewey.


Cooking The Space Books.

Launched in 2004, a space craft called the Gravity Probe has been using some very sophisticated gyros to try and prove Einsteins theory of Relativity correct by measuring if the Earth slightly warps time due to it's weight. Unfortunately, the gyros being used were apparently not machined entirely correctly, which meant the data being returned from the craft was 'bad'. On a tight budget anyway, Director Dr Everitt and his team came up with a Earth-based "solution" to the problem.

The Stanford team collected 11 ½ months’ worth of transmissions from Gravity Probe B, but tiny unforeseen drift in the gyros fouled the results. Dr. Everitt had to ask NASA for extra time and money so his 11-member team could figure out how to scrub the data.

Scrub the data, you say? A light polish? A shine job?

The niobium coating on the gyros and their housings was slightly uneven, causing tiny unpredictable electrical torques that made the gyros drift. The mission ended in 2005, but since then the Stanford team has been mapping niobium anomalies on each gyro, finding the patterns of distortion and subtracting the noise from the data.

NASA had budgeted money for a year’s worth of post-flight data analysis, but Dr. Everitt needed a lot more time, and NASA financed the project through 2007. That, it seemed, would be the end.
[...]

The team has forged ahead. In August, graduate students made a breakthrough in data analysis to bring the frame-dragging deviation within 15 percent of the predicted result. Dr. Everitt hopes to get it within 3 percent by mid-2010. The geodetic effect is currently within 1 percent of the predicted result and is expected to go even lower.

- www.nytimes.com/

Wait a minute, so the data the probe is sending back is apparently 'not right', and the supposedly-warped gyros are to blame, and now so you have a team hard at work, for years now, busy warping the data the probe is sending back in order for it to line up with the predicted data? Is this still science? Because it sounds like it stopped being science as soon as the craft took off and turned into some kind of statistical book-fixing exercise. How can you trust any of this after spending so long cooking it to match what you expected? I mean, why measure the Earth at all if you're just going to twist the data to match what you predicted would happen?



Overlooking The Obvious.

I'm sure you've all seen the horrific story in the news about the corrupt cops who killed a little old lady during a botched drug raid. The cops planted evidence on one guy to get him to give up another guy, and they used someone else in order to get a search warrant. Then...

In November 2006, the officers -- all members of Atlanta's narcotics squad -- gunned down Kathryn Johnston inside her home. The police claimed to be acting on information they received from a confidential informant that drugs were being sold from the house. That allegation turned out to be false.

From the beginning evidence showed the officers manipulated a highly suspect system to justify an assault on Johnston's home.

As AlterNet first reported in April 2007, the cops began by planting evidence on a known drug dealer to solicit information about narcotics being sold out of Johnston's home; they then used fabricated testimony from a separate confidential informant to obtain a search warrant.

A terrified Johnston fired a single shot from a gun she kept when the police entered her home on a "no-knock" warrant; she hit no one. The cops responded with nearly 40 shots, killing her instantly.

The Johnston tragedy shined a spotlight on the cavalier use of informant information to obtain arrest and search warrants.

And the officers involved have now been sent to jail, and rightly so. But there's a small part of the story that catches my attention.

A terrified Johnston fired a single shot from a gun she kept when the police entered her home on a "no-knock" warrant; she hit no one. The cops responded with nearly 40 shots, killing her instantly.

- www.alternet.org/

A "single shot"? That "hit no one"? This 'little old lady', a grandmother, responded to cops entering her home by grabbing a gun and firing off a shot at them? What the hell? I realise the cops were corrupt and all, but still it seems to me her reaction was kind of harsh in the extreme.

Why isn't that part of the story? Where was the gun? Where did she get it? What reason did she have for thinking these guys were not cops, or worthy of getting a bullet?




Film Review: My Bloody Valentine 3D.

It's funny how new technology is frequently used to mask over the same old crap. Usually the whitewash is very thin, so you can see how tired it is from the start. My Bloody Valentine, however, is a tired old cliche wrapped in a shiny new box: It's filmed in 3D. My, what a wonder the 3D realm is. From the startling open credits to the mundane closing ones, MBV is a visual feast in the third dimension, ranging from delectable shots of landscapes rushing toward you and various instruments hurtling toward you, to cardboard cutout-type effects of flat objects of people standing a few feet in front of a flat background. But when it works, it really works, and most of the time it works, albeit with the odd fuzzy shot.

The downside is that the tickets cost twice as much. Which I guess might almost be acceptable if it was a really good film, which sadly MBV is not. This film is in fact quite bad, telling the old tale of a miner who goes amok and kills a lot of people after a mining accident, then ten years later seemingly coming back and running amok yet again. The point of these films I guess is to try and figure out who the masked killer is, and I was pretty sure I had it pegged, until a very specific scene showed that it couldn't possibly be the guy. So then at the end when it turns out to be this guy after all, despite the very specific thing that prevented it from being him, I was quite disappointed. But not only did the film cheat, it was predictable, cliched, obvious, shallow and old-fashioned. It's fairly normal to have at least one female "tough" character these days, this is the 90's, girls can be and are just as tough as boys. Not in this film. The characters are blank, the story was dumb, the gore lacked any dramatic impact. Perhaps (hopefully) it's this last point that caused my fellow audience members to laugh out loud at each and every kill, no matter how grisly. I thought the point of horror movies was to be anything but roaring with laughter at each kill?

The only redeeming feature is the refreshing lack of shaky-cam. I assume this was due to the nature of shooting a film in 3D, it must be difficult to shake a giant, heavy, multiple camera rig around like it's a handy cam. The upshot of this is that the film is shot very well, professionally and smartly. The 3D effects are quite amazing to behold. A couple of sequences are quite good(...). But the flat plot and the flat characters are not redeemed by the 3D picture. Two pointy objects out of Five.



And Finally.

- Danziger

- Peace Out.

Oldie But A Goodie.

Conditions: Rainy.


Hacking The Code.

The US Navy's secretive Office of Naval Research has produced a large report that warns about the nature of warfare in the future. It predicts that wars will not be fought with such ancient technologies such as guns or humans, but with autonomous robots that are programmed to kill. The report goes on to dictate that such robots, as and when they start to roll off the production line, need to be programmed by a "strict warrior code", so as to guarantee that they cannot run amok. I imagine the planners of mankind's doom, after writing this report, felt very pleased with themselves. I wonder if they played a violin at all.

"There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do," Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said.

The reality, Dr Lin said, was that modern programmes included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire programme. Accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programmes would interact without extensive testing in the field -- an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.

The solution, he suggests, is to mix rules-based programming with a period of "learning" the rights and wrongs of warfare.
[...]

A simple ethical code along the lines of the "Three Laws of Robotics" postulated in 1950 by Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, will not be sufficient to ensure the ethical behaviour of autonomous military machines.

Dr Lin said: "We are going to need a warrior code."

- independent.ie/

Don't you love how unutterably wrong smart people can be? Don't get me wrong, pointing out that programs today are so complicated no one person can understand it all, and in those cracks lies the mistakes that will doom us all, is on the nose. But the entire approach here is flawed. It's the first rule of holes, again: If you're in a hole, stop digging.

Since building killer robots ensures that eventually they will run amok, then the solution logically does not lie in the building of said amok-running robots. Of course, such logic is being ignored, especially when there's money to be made.

In 2001, the Defense Authorization Act directed the Pentagon to "aggressively develop and field" robotic systems in an effort to reach the ambitious goal of having one-third of the deep strike aircraft unmanned within 10 years, and one-third of the ground combat vehicles unmanned within 15 years.

To make this a reality, federal funding for military robotics has skyrocketed. From fiscal year 2006 through 2012, the government will spend an estimated $1.7 billion on research for ground-based robots, according to the congressionally funded National Center for Defense Robotics. This triples what was allocated annually for such projects as recently as 2004.

The centerpiece of this roboticized fighting force of the future will be the 14 networked, manned and unmanned systems that will make up the Army's Future Combat System -- should it ever get off the ground. The creation of the weapons systems is also one of the most controversial and expensive the Pentagon has ever undertaken.

And the shiver that just ran up your spine is shared by every half-intelligent human on the planet. The military's current metallic robotic nightmaric project is named SWORDS, which stands for Special Weapons Observation Remote Direct-Action System. They stand three feet tall and roll on two tank treads.

...you freaking kidding me?

"They don't get hungry," Gordon Johnson, who headed a program on unmanned systems at the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon told the New York Times in 2005. "They're not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes."

They can't be reasoned with! They don't feel pain, or fear! And they absolutely will not stop, ever!

Ahem, excuse me.

Ronald Arkin, a leading roboticist at Georgia Tech, whose research the Defense Department funds, argues without a sense of irony that autonomous robots will be more humane than humans. Atrocities like the massacre by U.S. troops in Haditha, Iraq, would be less likely with robots, he told The Atlanta in November 2007, because they won't have emotions that "cloud their judgment and cause them to get angry."

Robots are also promoted as being cost-effective. On top of the annual salary and extra pay for combat duty, the government invests a great deal in recruiting, training, housing and feeding each soldier. Not to mention the costs of healthcare and death benefits, should a soldier be injured or killed.

By comparison, the current $245,000 price tag on SWORDS -- which could drop to $115,000 per unit if they are mass-produced -- is a steal.

So at this point there's little to stop the mechanized roll out of our future masters. Rather than watch your son or daughter go off to fight in Afghanistan, giant factories in Mexico and South Korea will suck in steel, plastic and rubber, and pump out automated killing machines to go do the same. And we'll all be safer on our cosy couches with a nice view of Armageddon on the TV. Is there anything that can stop our fate?

A different perspective is gained when the price of the robot is compared with the low-tech, low-cost weaponry that U.S. forces face on a daily basis in Iraq.

"You don't want your defenses to be so expensive that they'll bankrupt you," says Sharon Weinberger, a reporter for Wired's Danger Room blog. "If it costs us $100,000 to defeat a $500 roadside bomb, that doesn't sound like such a good strategy -- as pretty as it may look on YouTube and in press releases."

- alternet.org/waroniraq/

Ahh, the economy. Our one, last, hope is that building such a complicated system is far too expensive, and will take too long, for any nation to attempt, especially given how cheap life really is.

Of course, the exact same argument applied to building nuclear weapons.



Cartoon Commentary O' The Week.

- Ben Sargent

Film Review: Gran Torino.

I dunno what it is about Clint Eastwood movies, but the man can make a damn fine film. He doesn't do anything revolutionary, you'll never remark about how his film showed you something you've never seen before, it's just sheer good old-fashioned straight up and down filmmaking that makes it all work. Clint knows what the point of the story is, and he just plain tells it.

Gran Torino is essentially a story of redemption. Clint plays, essentially, an old Harry Callahan, now a grumpy old man, isolated from his family and who's just lost his wife, who's given a last chance to make a difference in his community. It's a story about death, community, differences and life and just sheer gutsiness. Maybe it's a little cliched, maybe it's a little hoky, but it's so well put together, and so earnest that you just go with it.

You'll laugh at the funny moments, be shocked by the awful moments and be sad at the sad parts, it's film that knocks you down old school, and does exactly what it should. There's even a bit of a twist in the tail. Clint may be old, okay, maybe he's really, really old, but like that car of his he's just as cool as ever. I hope to grow up to be just like him. Four grimaces out of Five.



- Peace out

The Light Was Green!

Conditions: Cold.


The More Things Change.

It seems there are universal constants in America's war on ...well, everything. One constant for instance is America's built-in confidence in telling other countries what to do. And another constant is in America's total inability to keep track of the weapons it gives away. This is such a long-standing trend that they're starting to repeat themselves. Yet again, America is admitting they've lost track of the weapons they've given away in Afghanistan.

The US military has failed to keep track of thousands of weapons shipped to Afghanistan, leaving them vulnerable to being lost or stolen, a report says.

The report has been compiled by congressional auditors, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

It found that, in the four years up to June 2008, the US military failed to keep complete records on some 222,000 weapons entering the country.

• US military officials failed to keep proper records on about 87,000 rifles, pistols, mortars and other weapons sent to Afghanistan between December 2004 and June 2008 - about a third of all the weapons sent
• There was a similar lack of management of a further 135,000 light weapons donated to Afghan forces via the US military by 21 countries
• The military failed even to record the serial numbers of some 46,000 weapons, making it impossible to confirm receipt of weapons or identify any which had fallen into the hands of militants
• The serial numbers of 41,000 weapons were recorded, but US military officials still had no idea where they were

- news.bbc.co.uk/

Well, you know, that's okay. I mean, what harm ever came from America giving away huge amounts of weapons in Afghanistan without keeping track of them? It's not as if they're dangerous, or could be used against America in some way, right?



Not Your Ordinary Everyday Fenderbender.

Despite the sereneness of life down here on the surface of the planet, in orbit above us is a constant twisting maelstrom of giant metallic objects, all swinging around our world at breakneck speed. Each one of them represents years of work and millions and millions of dollars worth of effort. Now, you'd think with that much at stake there'd be some kind of organization going on. But no, it's as out of control as can be.

US and Russian communications satellites have collided in space in what is thought to be the biggest incident of its kind to date.

The US commercial Iridium spacecraft hit a defunct Russian satellite at an altitude of about 800km (500 miles) over Siberia on Tuesday, Nasa said.

The Russian satellite weighed about a ton, and the Iridium one about half that, and the impact itself occurred at roughly twice the height of where the International Space Station regularly hangs out. Gee do you think that could be a problem?

Litter in orbit - caused in part by the break-ups of old satellites - has increased to such an extent that it is now the biggest threat to a space shuttle in flight.

Mr Johnson said that at the beginning of this year about 17,000 manmade pieces of debris were orbiting Earth.

The items, some as small as 10cm (four inches), are tracked by the US Space Surveillance Network - sending information to help spacecraft operators avoid the debris.

- news.bbc.co.uk/

Can you imagine how many more pieces of debris would be caused by crashing a half-ton object into a 1 ton object in space? And each of these new pieces of debris is going to be launched onto their own new erratic orbit. So how many more collisions do we require before the entire orbital plane is choked with debris, and mankind is finally confined to Earth? Whatever the number is, it just got reduced by one.



More:
newscientist.com: satellite collision more powerful than chinas asat test



Film Review: Valkyrie

It's always a tremendous challenge to tell a story that everyone already knows the ending to. And even more so when the ending will be a bad one. The protagonists are doomed to fail before you've even sat down in your seat. James Cameron solved this dilemma with Titanic by creating a Romeo and Juliet love story on the ill-fated liner. But Valkyrie has no such pleasant distractions. This is the tale of Count Von Stauffenberg's failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, and that's all it is. And so because there is nothing else here, the movie fails too.

But not for a lack of talent. The film is positively peppered with brilliant actors, most of them British, topped by Tom Cruise. Tom's taken a lot of flack over the years, but the one thing about him is that he really can act, and he really throws himself into roles. And Count Von Stauffenberg's tale has the ingredients of a great role, it should be a stirring one. But there's something wrong here. The accent's are the first problem. Every WW2 movie I've ever seen had the Germans sounding German. Here for the first time we have an exclusively-German WW2 movie and the only guy who actually sounds German is Hitler himself. It's odd, and a little off-putting. But ultimately, that's not the real problem. The real problem relates to an odd feeling of "stiffness", or formality, that pervades this film, from the actors to the setting to the plot itself. It's almost as if everyone is nervous about making this film.

Films are meant to be an entertainment. I mean, we're not here for our health. And this film ultimately is not that entertaining, it works more like a documentary. And that would be fine, but documentaries give you a lot of information about the various people involved and the plot itself. Here, director Brian Singer has concentrated on Tom Cruise pretty much to the exclusion of everyone else, and even then he's kept strictly to the parts of the script that move the plot forward. Count Von Stauffenberg wants to kill Hitler in order to save his country, there's a bunch of other high-ranking officers who want likewise, and that's it. There's no debate, no resistance, no argument: so there's no drama. Conflict, and therefore drama, is the heart of everything. WHY do these men, these highly-decorated officers want Hitler dead? What, specifically, have they seen, what have they heard, what have they maybe participated in, during the war that has made them make this ultimate decision of betrayal and bravery to plot the assassination of their leader? A quick shot of Stauffenberg handing out medals in a packed hospital, or looking at his new fake eyeball, is not enough compared to the size and scale of this plot. It's almost as if the idea of German officers organising a Hitler assassination plot is assumed to be enough all by itself to keep us all riveted. Well it's not enough. The ship is going to hit an iceberg. Watching the sailors just sail the ship toward the iceberg for two hours is actually kinda boring. Two and a half fingers out of Five.


- Peace out

Get On The Bus.

Conditions: Relaxedly Warm.


Washing My Hands.

One of the big deals Obama has brought to American foreign policy is the long-awaited closure of the Guantanamo Bay pan-dimensional POW camp and steakhouse. And this is obviously both a good and necessary thing. He's also ordered the closing of the CIA's secret prisons, and the removal of torture from American interrogation tactical handbook. This is a hell of a start. But there's one thing left, one final turd in the punchbowl of American justice: Illegal Rendition, handing suspects over to other countries so they can be tortured for information without getting your hands dirty. That program is not being shut down, in fact it looks to be expanding.

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism - aside from Predator missile strikes - for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured.

The European Parliament condemned renditions as "an illegal instrument used by the United States." Prisoners swept up in the program have sued the CIA as well as a Boeing Co. subsidiary accused of working with the agency on dozens of rendition flights.

But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration's war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.

Now, this is disappointing. A tortured man will say or do anything to stop being tortured, regardless if the torturers are American or ...Belgian, or Chinese, or whoever the hell the CIA farms that work out to. It's illegal, it's immoral, it's pointless and it's just plain stupid. It's like taking down the broken roller coaster but leaving the broken bumper cars. Why dismantle everything else and not this?

"Obviously you need to preserve some tools - you still have to go after the bad guys," said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. "The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice."

One provision in one of Obama's orders appears to preserve the CIA's ability to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects as long as they are not held long-term. The little-noticed provision states that the instructions to close the CIA's secret prison sites "do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis."

Despite concern about rendition, Obama's prohibition of many other counter-terrorism tools could prompt intelligence officers to resort more frequently to the "transitory" technique.

- truthout.org/

Well as the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then there's going to be a lot of flattened thumbs in your immediate future. Perhaps this is a result of Obama's audaciousness in shutting everything else down, this sticks up only because everything else has been flattened. And that in time this too will cease, but I don't know. The CIA are not "nice". They are not "respectful". They are cold, hard professionals. And they will take any advantage they possibly can in the execution of their duty. Leaving them this both ensures that they will use it, and that somewhere along the line you feel that they need to have it. Like if the CIA couldn't at least have someone torture a snatched suspect then all the agents would just quit in protest at not being allowed to do their jobs. Go work at KMart, or something. Frankly, given the quality of intelligence the CIA provided during the Bush years, we may be better off. Just don't go shopping at KMart without backup.




Hell of a START.

Next up in the Obama news, the President is to meet with the Russians for the purpose of reducing nuclear arms by 80%. That wasn't a misprint, Eighty percent reduction, cutting stockpiles of Nuclear warheads to a measly 1,000 each.

Key to the initiative is a review of the Bush Administration's plan for a US missile defence shield in Eastern Europe, a project fiercely opposed by Moscow.

Mr Obama is to establish a non-proliferation office at the White House to oversee the talks, expected to be headed by Gary Samore, a non-proliferation negotiator in the Clinton Administration. The talks will be driven by Hillary Clinton's State Department.

No final decision on the defence shield has been taken by Mr Obama. Yet merely delaying the placement of US missiles in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic - which if deployed would cost the US $4 billion annually - removes what has been a major impediment to Russian co-operation on arms reduction.

Any agreement would put pressure on Britain, which has 160 nuclear warheads, and other nuclear powers to reduce their stockpiles.

Mr Obama has pledged to put nuclear weapons reduction at the heart of his presidency and his first move will be to reopen talks with Moscow to replace the 1991 US-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start), which expires in December. Under that pact, the two countries have cut their respective stockpiles from roughly 10,000 to 5,000.

- truthout.org/

Of course, we can all happily be annihilated many times over by a couple-thousand nuclear weapons as we could by the tens of thousands of before, so the essential bedrock of Mutually Assured Destruction remains. But still, impressive, no?



Blackmailing The Poodle.

Speaking of Guantanamo detainees being tortured, an interesting wrinkle appeared during a court hearing concerning Ethiopian-Born Brit Binyam Mohamed, seized in 2002, renditioned to Morocco, tortured (allegedly), moved to Afghanistan and then Guantanamo. Looks like the Brits want to know if there is evidence against this man. That's where it gets nasty.

An unprecedented high court ruling yesterday blamed the US, with British connivance, for keeping the "powerful evidence" secret, sparking criticism from lawyers, campaigners and MPs, who claimed the government had capitulated to American bullying.

Two senior judges said they were powerless to reveal the information about the torture of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident, because David Miliband, the foreign secretary, had warned the court the US was threatening to stop sharing intelligence about terrorism with the UK.

In a scathing judgment, the judges said the evidence, and what MI5 knew about it, must remain secret because according to Miliband, the American threats meant "the public of the United Kingdom would be put at risk".

Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones made clear they were unhappy with their decision, but said they had no alternative as a result of Miliband's claim. Their ruling revealed that Miliband stuck to his position about the threat to the UK even after Barack Obama signed orders two weeks ago banning torture and announcing the closure of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

- truthout.org/

And I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say: "WHAT?!!" The Americans have threatened to stop sharing intelligence with the Brits if they reveal information concerning the possible torture of a British suspect the Americans are still holding in Guantanamo? Are you kidding me? Did I wake up in Bizzaro-World this morning? Am I still sleeping? Are you even real? I hope not. You'd better all be figments of my pathetic imagination.



Satirical Website O' The Week.



The one thing about the internet is that if something happens, someone will lampoon it in some way. Some might remember the Bus advertising campaign in London recently that questioned the existence of God? Well, now we can go to a website and write our own slogan on the side of the bus. So, have at it.

- The Bus Slogan Generator

- Peace out