Seems Fairly Straight Forward To Me

Conditions: Warming. Maybe.


On A Boat, Mother & Father

It seems to me that parenting consists of two levels. The level of watching out for your kid, and the level of trying to get it to be smart, happy and independent. Now the second level is a tough one. Raising your kid in such a way that they grow into a well-rounded adult is no easy task. Probably why there's so many books on the subject. But the first level is, I submit, an amazingly simple proposition. You have a kid. He or she is a little dumb, a little inexperienced, a little ...small. So you watch out for them. Easy. And so it is with much surprise that we've found out about a couple in the Netherlands who are quite happy for their 13 year old daughter to go off sailing around the world, on her own.

This, frankly, looks like a failure of parenting, and thankfully the Dutch courts have stepped in. But they haven't stepped all the way in.

A 13-year-old girl's plan to sail solo around the world was called "undeniably daring and risky" by Dutch judges Friday. They refused, however, to scrap the venture in a high-profile clash between child care authorities and liberal Dutch parenting.

The three judges at Utrecht District court ordered authorities to take temporary guardianship of Laura Dekker, delaying her plan to set sail next week on her 26-foot yacht Guppy in her bid to become the youngest person to sail solo around the globe.

"I wouldn't go if I or my boat wasn't up to it," Laura told Dutch national broadcaster NOS."So things have stayed the same, except it is going to take a little longer."

The court appointed a child psychologist to report on her capacity to cope with the risks and possible harm of two years of isolation.

A child psychologist? Really? We need a shrink to tell us whether letting a kid sail herself around the world for two years is a good idea or not? Are we that dumb?

While the judges ordered child care workers to take responsibility for Laura, they stopped short of removing her from her father's home. They acknowledged he had tried to stop the trip and then to make it as safe as possible.

"This case is about whether the government ... can restrict the broad freedom parents have in bringing up and caring for their children," presiding judge M. Oostendorp said. She added the court does not believe the father can be "accused of serious neglect."

- google.com/

Well, I guess we'll be revising that opinion when Laura is never heard from again somewhere past the Cape. And let me get this straight: her father has "tried" to stop the trip? Of his 13 year old kid. Sailing around the world. He tried? Really? Did he try sending her to her room? Did he try chopping her boat into matchwood? Did he try just flat out telling her "No! You're staying in school, and that's final!" Yeah, he "tried". Right. Is this what modern parenting has come to, an inability to make the most simplistic of decisions?



Film Review: District 9

The best Sci-Fi is that which uses the convention of the genre to amplify and reflect back to the audience the human condition. In this sense District 9 is a triumph, a powerful and emotional film that uses the ideas of aliens and spaceships and technology to tell a very human story about society. Set in Johannesburg in the 80's, District 9 is basically a story about racism and intolerance. When a vast alien ship suddenly arrives over the city containing around a million starving and abandoned alien workers, the world is at first astonished. But as the aliens are moved to a giant shantytown, and violence between the aliens and the humans starts to break out, a government plan is put into affect to shift the aliens out away from the city, by force.

The underlying plot is that the powers that be are frustrated at being unable to use any of the alien technology, as the weapons are DNA encoded to the aliens, and the ship is missing it's command module. The aliens themselves are basically worker-bees, more cargo than crew, and so are unable to teach anybody anything. The plot revolves around the rather odd Wikus, appointed by his powerful father in law to head up the relocation mission. He's essentially a nice guy, but like everyone else considers the aliens a sub-species, who only respond to threats and force. The film really comes alive when Wikus suffers an accident while carrying out the eviction, and starts mutating into an alien, which gives the corporations a fantastic chance to understand how the alien weapons systems work. The focus is on Wikus slowly, gradually, eventually, realizing how inhuman he's been acting, now that he's becoming one of them.

It's a brutal and harrowing film, violent and difficult to watch at times. There is a hero's journey here, but hung around the neck of a very flawed character, who learns the hard way about empathy. It's sci fi, it's an action film, it's a drama, the director has done a pretty good job of putting together a compelling film. However, the one giant fly in the soup is the constant use of shaky cam. The film is shot mostly documentary-style, even when there isn't a reason to do so, which means the camera is constantly shaking about intolerably. It really hurts the film, interfering with the story and characters. The strength of what's happening does shine through, particularly the brilliant, cathartic and exciting finale, but one feels it could have worked a lot better if some more time was spent on shooting it properly. Nevertheless, a brave and entertaining film about difficult subjects and characters. Four alien roosters out of Five.


- Peace out

Cold, Desolate, Contains Protein

Conditions: Tentatively Warm.


Back In '04, Again

The latest revelation from the Bush administration has the Presidents aides "pressuring" the then-homeland security chief Tom Ridge to raise the terror alert level. Because of an impending threat, you inquire? No, because of the impending election.

Washington - Former US homeland security chief Tom Ridge charges in a new book that top aides to then-president George W. Bush pressured him to raise the "terror alert" level to sway the November 2004 US election.

Then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and attorney general John Ashcroft pushed him to elevate the color-coded threat level, but Ridge refused, according to a summary from his publisher, Thomas Dunne Books.
[...]

Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania, was the first secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security that the US Congress created in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes.

He also says that Bush's homeland security adviser at the White House, Fran Townsend, called his department ahead of an August 1, 2004 speech to ask Ridge to include a reference to "defensive measures ... away from home" -- language that he read as being a reference to the Iraq war.

In those remarks, Ridge said he was raising the threat alert level for the financial services sector in New York City, northern New Jersey, and Washington DC, and went on to praise Bush's leadership against extremism.

"The reports that have led to this alert are the result of offensive intelligence and military operations overseas, as well as strong partnerships with our allies around the world, such as Pakistan," said Ridge.

"Such operations and partnerships give us insight into the enemy so we can better target our defensive measures here and away from home," he said at the time.

He later publicly acknowledged that much of the information underpinning the new alert was three years old, stoking Bush critics' charges of political manipulation.

- truthout.org/

It'd be nice if for once we could have had predictions of how manipulative and downright shady the Bush administration was, and have those predictions turn out to be incorrect.



Flash: Universe Just Got A Little Warmer.

Back in 2004 a space probe sent out by Nasa flew through the trail of a comet and returned to Earth. Well now the scientists have finished analyzing it, and have quite the surprising claim: that a building block of proteins has been found in said comet.

That adds to the prevailing notion that many of the ingredients for the origin of life showered down on the early Earth when asteroids (interplanetary rocks orbiting the inner solar system) and comets (dirty ice balls that generally congregate in the outer solar system beyond Neptune) made impact with the planet.

In the new research, scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md., detected the amino acid glycine in comet bits brought back in 2006 by the NASA space probe Stardust.

“It tells us more about the inventory of organics in the early solar system,” said Jamie Elsila, an astrochemist at Goddard who led the research.

Amino acids are small molecules that, when strung together into chains, form a diversity of proteins. For four decades, scientists have found a multitude of amino acids in some meteorites, the bits of asteroids that land on Earth. More recently, astronomers reported that amino acids might float throughout the cosmos, a belief resulting from their detection of the color signatures of glycine, the simplest of the amino acids, in distant interstellar gas clouds.

- nytimes.com/

Sp, turns out deep space may be a lot more fertile than we thought it was. Of course, this doesn't answer the 64 billion dollar question of where the Proteins actually came from in the first place. But I guess it's a start.



Film Review: Public Enemies.

I really don't know what Michael Mann is doing anymore. I'm sure he considers himself the pioneer of digital filming, and perhaps as such he feels the need to keep pushing it one step further. But every time you watch one of his movies now you're confronted with a film that really doesn't look like a film should. Grainy, shaky, and bobbing around, his last few features felt more like awkward documentaries than films. Public Enemies attempts to tell the tale of John Dillinger, the bank-robbing gangster, who was running loose back in the thirties. It's fairly ripe territory, and it certainly been covered before, but Michael seems to be trying to strip as much glamour out of it as possible.

It's a gritty, grimy, desperate film. Johnny Depp stars, and he does what he can with the script he has. The problem is that there's just nothing really here. Dillinger was a gangster who robbed banks, the government formed the FBI who then had the authority to chase him across state lines, leading to a series of violent bank holdups and car chases. The key to Dillinger's downfall seems to be a combination of him falling for a girl and trying to take her with him, and the formation of organised crime who, while being fond of Dillinger, were not happy about the attention his antics brought their fledging racket, and so stopped helping him. Dillinger, who personified the never-think-about-tomorrow gangster stereotype, quickly became an outcast. This doesn't really lead us towards any kind of warm conclusion, and the portrayal of the feds, led by Christian Bale, leaves them looking like nothing more than a bunch of amateur thugs with badges and guns.

So we spend the film in a grainy, grimy, dark, old-fashioned America, slowly spiraling downward toward an inevitable violent death. The film certainly seems accurate in tone, but film's aren't really meant to be first and foremost about accuracy. It's supposed to be about a story, and this story is not much fun at all. It's a long film too, feels a lot longer than it's actual running time. I think that they wanted to make Dillinger something of an enigma, somewhat noble in his intentions and loyalties, and casting Johnny Depp goes a long way toward that goal. But there's a fine line between enigmatic and hollow, and here it's all too easy to see the flaws and shortcomings. There's no one to cheer for, there's no happy outcome, there's nothing here but violence and death. If that was the intention, then perhaps this should have been a documentary rather than a film. One and a half bullets out of Five.


- Peace out

Playing Roulette.

Conditions: Raining


Not Really Watching The Skies

One of the most important, yet least public, jobs on this planet is the task of monitoring space for giant asteroids, heading for Earth. This is undertaken by Nasa. The problem with this is that Nasa also do other, less important things, and have been facing a bit of a financial squeeze.

Without more funding, NASA will not meet its goal of tracking 90 percent of all deadly asteroids by 2020, according to a report released today by the National Academy of Sciences.

The agency is on track to soon be able to spot 90 percent of the potentially dangerous objects that are at least a kilometer (.6 miles) wide, a goal previously mandated by Congress.

Asteroids of this size are estimated to strike Earth once every 500,000 years on average and could be capable of causing a global catastrophe if they hit Earth. In 2008, NASA's Near Earth Object Program spotted a total of 11,323 objects of all sizes.

But without more money in the budget, NASA won't be able to keep up with a 2005 directive to track 90 percent of objects bigger than 460 feet across. An impact from an asteroid of this size could cause significant damage and be very deadly, particularly if it were to strike near a populated area.

- edition.cnn.com/

Two important bits of information there. One is that Nasa is going to struggle to meet it's obligations regarding the task of saving the Earth from annihilation. The other is that they're only scheduled to actually be doing that after another 11 years. The hell?

What's going on is that the initial goal was to track the large 1 kilometer bits of rock. But then someone thought about Tunguska

For example, the NRC report states that the body that caused the 1908 Tunguska explosion and destroyed 2,000 square kilometers of Siberian forest was only 30-40 meters in diameter. This realization is what led Congress to change its mind and decide that NASA should track even smaller asteroids. The new goal: track 90 percent of NEOs 140 meters or larger in diameter by 2020.

The NRC report primarily takes issue with the lack of action on this goal from anyone involved: Congress has not volunteered funding for their mandate, and NASA has not allotted any of their budget to it, either. The equipment currently in use to track NEOs can easily see the 1km monsters, but it's not sensitive enough to track the 140m asteroids. As a result, if a Tunguska-sized body were headed for Earth today, its arrival would probably be a complete surprise.

Of course, the Tunguska explosion is the only collision of this sort in recorded history, suggesting that threatening bodies that cross Earth's path are fortunately rare. Considering this, and the fact that the most disastrous varieties of asteroids are fairly well covered, danger is probably not imminent.

- arstechnica.com/

Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly how the Russians near Tunguska felt as well, back in 1908. Frankly, the Earth is littered with impact craters, clearly we have gotten hit hard in the past, and will be hit again in the future. Priorities need to be worked out here, and keeping a close eye on the one disaster that we can 100% predict with total certainty will happen one day, should be a pretty damn high priority.



Film Review: G.I. Joe

Yet another famous toy franchise makes it's foray onto the big screen with the advent of G.I Joe. To be honest, I don't really know all that much about the G.I Joe universe. And to be even more honest, I really wasn't expecting much from this film at all. Happily, I was pleasantly surprised. G.I Joe turns out to be a well made fast-paced action-packed adventure about a group of international special forces trying to recover a dangerous weapon that's fallen into the wrong hands. The wrong hands being, oddly, the hands of the company that built the weapon in the first place, but it's that kind of film. Thankfully light on the pro-American military parade that it could have been, it uses two new recruits to introduce us to the Joes, and, via an old flame turned femme fatale, to the bad guys.

This could have been so easily a total mess. Directed by Stephen Sommers, who knows a thing or two about letting CG-heavy films getting carried away with themselves, what's happened here is almost a miracle: It's a toy franchise action film that spends a large amount of time developing the characters, and the backstories that set them all up, including a broken promise to a lost love, a Scottish arms-dealing ancestral tradition, and even a decades-old blood feud between two samurai. Relationships between the characters are fostered, and actually grow. The plot actually has a bit of sense to it. There's a couple of reasonably good twists. Well played.

Of course, it's not perfect. There is some use of the shaky cam for the action sequences, which is annoying. And while most of the fights are brutal, and there is a substantial body count, there's still a overall sense of PG13-ish bloodlessness that lessens the impact. Still, it's exciting, it's well-acted, it's interesting, it's pretty well made, it's a good time at the cinema. Three and a half henchmen out of five. Go Joe.



- Peace out

Foreboding.

Conditions: Shaky.


Progress.

Looks like the robot drones racked up another kill this week with the assassination of Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan.

The U.S. had offered a reward of $5million (£3million) for information leading to Mehsud's location or arrest. The Pakistan government put an additional $615,000 bounty on his head.
[...]

He and his wife died when a U.S. drone missile hit his father-in-law's house in the lawless tribal area of South Waziristan. Pakistani and U.S. intelligence officials said the CIA was behind the strike.

A local tribesman said Mehsud was being treated for kidney pain, and had been put on a drip by a doctor, when the missile struck.
[...]

Diplomats in Islamabad say Mehsud's death would mark a major coup for Pakistan, but many doubt it will help Western troops fighting the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan as most of his focus has been on attacking Pakistan's government and security forces.

I wonder what benefit killing Mehsud's wife brings to the war on terror? But, more than it not helping in the war in Afghanistan, is the point that it's not going to help in the war in Pakistan, either.

Karin von Hippel, a security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, doubted whether the removal of one Taliban leader would have a lasting impact.

'What happens... is another comes in and takes their place pretty quickly,' von Hippel said.

She reckoned there were more than 40 militia commanders among the Pakistani Taliban, and their relationship with the Afghan Taliban was sometimes hazy.

'I'm not sure we have a very good understanding of how all these these militia groups operate within Pakistan and with the networks across the border in Afghanistan,' she said.

- dailymail.co.uk/

So. Yet again we have news that a pilotless drone has blown some people up in Pakistan, one of them being someone important, and that this probably won't really make any difference. Of course this isn't going to make any difference, when has assassination in wartime ever made a difference? All this does is make the Taliban even more militant, more secretive and less willing to talk. How does that help anyone except the companies that manufacture the drones?

In fact, a leading professor of artificial intelligence has come out with a warning of how the nature of war is changing, heading towards a future where war is even more inhuman than it is now.

Professor Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics, has long drawn attention to the psychological distance from the horrors of war that is maintained by operators who pilot unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), often from thousands of miles away.

"These guys who are driving them sit there all day...they go home and eat dinner with their families at night," he said.

"It's kind of a very odd way of fighting a war - it's changing the character of war dramatically."

The rise in technology has not helped in terms of limiting collateral damage, Professor Sharkey said, because the military intelligence behind attacks was not keeping pace.

Between January 2006 and April 2009, he estimated, 60 such "drone" attacks were carried out in Pakistan. While 14 al-Qaeda were killed, some 687 civilian deaths also occurred, he said.

687 civilian deaths to 14 enemy deaths. And since these are being done by drones you have to put a large question mark behind the 14 Al-Queda kills.

That physical distance from the actual theatre of war, he said, led naturally to a far greater concern: the push toward unmanned planes and ground robots that make their decisions without the help of human operators at all.

The problem, he said, was that robots could not fulfil two of the basic tenets of warfare: discriminating friend from foe, and "proportionality", determining a reasonable amount of force to gain a given military advantage.

"Robots do not have the necessary discriminatory ability," he explained.

"They're not bright enough to be called stupid - they can't discriminate between civilians and non-civilians; it's hard enough for soldiers to do that.

But that's not stopping countries from embracing the bright clean future promised by robot warfare.

However, he warned that work toward ever more autonomous killing machines is carrying on, noting the deployment of Israel's Harpy - a fully autonomous UAV that dive-bombs radar systems with no human intervention.

He cautioned that an international debate was necessary before further developments in decision-making robots could unfold.

- news.bbc.co.uk/

A fully autonomous weapon, that will fly around in the sky? Are you kidding me? This has to be some kind of joke. Surely we're not that stupid.




Is There Something Wrong With The Sun?

Sunspots, the bane of international communications and satellite-builders, are for some reason appearing less readily than usual. Natural process, or ominous indicator?

In the latest lull, the Sun should have reached its calmest, least pockmarked state last fall.

Indeed, last year marked the blankest year of the Sun in the last half-century — 266 days with not a single sunspot visible from Earth. Then, in the first four months of 2009, the Sun became even more blank, the pace of sunspots slowing more.

“It’s been as dead as a doornail,” David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said a couple of months ago.

Of course in our technology-dependent lifestyles, this is a good thing. But what does it mean for the future?

A panel of 12 scientists assembled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now predicts that the May 2013 peak will average 90 sunspots during that month. That would make it the weakest solar maximum since 1928, which peaked at 78 sunspots. During an average solar maximum, the Sun is covered with an average of 120 sunspots.

But the panel’s consensus “was not a unanimous decision,” said Douglas A. Biesecker, chairman of the panel. One member still believed the cycle would roar to life while others thought the maximum would peter out at only 70.

Among some global warming skeptics, there is speculation that the Sun may be on the verge of falling into an extended slumber similar to the so-called Maunder Minimum, several sunspot-scarce decades during the 17th and 18th centuries that coincided with an extended chilly period.

Most solar physicists do not think anything that odd is going on with the Sun. With the recent burst of sunspots, “I don’t see we’re going into that,” Dr. Hathaway said last week.

- nytimes.com/

So the sun is calmer than it traditionally should be, and mighty science has no answer. History suggests at this point we start building large flat-topped pyramids. You know, just to be sure.


- Peace out