Timeline of lead up to the invasion

Remember the two "kidnapped" Israeli soldiers? Israel swore they would never negotiate for their release. Now that they've backed down and have agreed to negotiate for a prisoner exchange, it is worth revisiting the question of the "kidnapping".

Of course these two soldiers weren't kidnapped from their beds or snatched off the street. They were taken prisoner during a clash between Hezbollah fighters and IDF soldiers back in July. Israel insisted that Hezbollah had crossed the border into Israel -- but not at first. It took a few days before the "Hezbollah started it first" story hit the media. Originally, Israel stated that the soldiers had been captured in Lebanon.

Forbes quoted Israeli officials:

The militant group Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers during clashes Wednesday across the border in southern Lebanon, prompting a swift reaction from Israel, which sent ground forces into its neighbor to look for them.

The forces were trying to keep the soldiers' captors from moving them deeper into Lebanon, Israeli government officials said on condition of anonymity.

See also here.

And here which points out that the Israelis had not been able to recover the tank destroyed in the raid (at least as of the time of writing).

It's worth remembering the timeline of events:

• June (date unknown, but on or before the 13th):
  Israel apparently shells a Gaza beach, injuring at least one family of Palestinians.


• June 13: Israel launches another airstrike against Gaza, killing eleven.


• June 24: Israel raids Gaza, kidnapping/capturing two Palestinian civilians, one of whom is a doctor.


• June 27: Hamas apparently used a tunnel to raid Israel, capturing an Israeli soldier:
  
  

  "KIBBUTZ KEREM SHALOM - Israel (CBS/AP) June 25 -- The brazen pre-dawn attack was the first ground assault by Palestinian militants since Israel pulled out of Gaza last summer, and the first abduction of an Israeli soldier by Palestinians since 1994..."

  
  If you've been reading media reports here, one would be forgiven for thinking that Israelis soldiers were being kidnapped on a daily basis.


• June 27: The plot thickens. The Shin Bet claims that the IDF was given detailed warnings of where and when the tunnel raid was going to take place.
  
  Probe: IDF knew militants planned abduction via tunnel
  Link (apparently no longer on line) here.


• July 12th: Two Israeli soldiers were captured by Hezbollah. Immediately afterwards, Israel begins launching air strikes against not just the Hezbollah-controlled south, but Beirut and the Christian north, including Lebanese army bases in the north.


• Also on July 12: IDF Chief Lt. General Dan Halutz threatens to "turn the clock back on Lebanon 20 years", as reported in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.
  Sorry no direct link, but it is referenced here.

After the Israeli invasion had started, SF Gate reveals that the attack on Lebanon has been planned for at least one year and possibly as many as three. Israel's claims of self-defence do not hold water.

Trish Schuh of Counterpunch has also discussed this shifting border crossing. Now that Israeli lawyers are suing the Lebanese government (talk about blaming the victim), the question of who cross the border first will take in greater importance. She quotes a report on the ABC News in Australia, quoting the IDF:

The sources say the Israeli soldiers had been seized at around 9am local time across the border from Aita al Shaab, some 15 kilometers from the Mediterranean coast. The Israeli army confirmed that two Israeli soldiers had been captured on the Lebanese frontier. Israeli ground forces crossed into Lebanon to hunt for the missing soldiers, Israeli Army Radio said.

and the Voice of America, reporting from Jerusalem on July 12:

Speaking to reporters outside the Israeli Foreign Ministry, spokesman Mark Regev says Hezbollah is responsible for the violence. "It appears we have an escalation in the North," he said. "It is very clear that the escalation started on the Lebanese side of the border, and Israel will respond appropriately."

"The escalation started on the Lebanese side of the border". What were Israeli troops doing on the Lebanese side of the border? Picking daisies? Sounds like "He started it by hitting me back" to me.

Although it is getting further away from the immediate cause of the war, it is worth remembering the Israeli provocations towards Hamas and Hezbollah (assassinations, both bungled and successful, bombings, shelling of civilians, etc.). In Down the Memory Hole we have some hard figures which show which group of people is at greater risk of death and injury and who it really is that needs defending:

...between September 2005 and June 2006, 144 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli forces, according to a list compiled by the Israeli human rights group B'tselem; 29 of those killed were children. During the same period, no Israelis were killed as a result of violence from Gaza.

The broader implications of Israel's failure

Israel's failure to defeat Hezbollah has consequences which extend beyond the borders of Israel and Lebanon. The Agonist discusses some of the reasons for that failure, and points out that the broader implication is potentially very broad indeed: a sea-change in who counts as a major player. It isn't just nation states any longer:

It should also make people start thinking more seriously about so called non state actors like Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers and the Islamic Courts Union and their similarities and differences from States. Such organization - with the support of a population and fulfilling most of the roles of the government, yet not internationally recognized, are likely to increase in number and efficacy over time - and as we have just seen, even now, they are a force to be reckoned with.

Welcome the new Middle East. It's not your father's Middle East anymore.

Of course, this change has been building for many decades, at least since the Taliban and other non-state groups forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan. The Tamil Tigers have been making their voices heard (sometimes at the point of a gun) for many decades too. But this is the first time that a first-world army has had its eye blackened by a non-state in open combat.

Court bans warrantless spying on Americans

This is huge news: the rule of law hasn't quite disappeared from the USA yet. A Federal Court has ruled that President Bush's not-so-secret warrantless spying on Americans is illegal.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether Bush Co. will obey the law, or whether the Reds in Congress will change the law.

MX survey

Last Friday, the free news gossip-paper MX ran the results of a survey on Melbournians sexual attitutes. One highlight was "Lois", 18, from Hallam:

Sex on a first date?

No, I believe in sex after marriage.

How many partners have you had?

Five.

Do you expect to get married?

Of course, probably when I'm about 23 or 24.

O-kay.

And then there was the young man "Taylor", 20, of Vermont:

How many partners have you had?

Let's just say I'm not a slut.

He might as well put up a screaming neon sign on his forehead "Virgin!!!".

Facts on the ground

Billmon of The Whiskey Bar has looked at the American claims that Israel won a great victory over terrorism in this war:

Strictly from a humanitarian point of view, it's both grotesque and repulsive to have to listen to Ehud Olmert, Sheikh Nasrallah and the Boy King all proclaiming victory in their nasty little war -- even as the bodies are still literally being pulled out of the rubble.
[...]
In other words, Bush managed to make both himself and America look like petty, pathetic losers -- which is certainly true, but hardly needs to be flaunted before the world. Typically, the moron ignored -- or never understood -- the concept of plausible deniability, which is one of the key benefits that proxy wars offer to their superpower patrons. If your guy wins, you take the credit and make sure everybody notices how well your weapons systems performed. If he loses, well, it had nothing to do with you. This at least leaves you with as much diplomatic manuevering room as is possible under the circumstances.

[...] So it looks like all of Bush's canned speechifying is going to be trumped by Hussein Kalash's plain statement of fact.

"We're still here."

Some facts speak for themselves.

Well worth reading.

Taking credit for the cornucopia of foolishness

Now that the ceasefire in Lebanon is (mostly) holding, all the major players are claiming victory. Historian Juan Cole wonders why anyone would want to claim victory in this sordid little Keystone Cops war:

Since the United Nations resolution calling for a halt to hostilities, Prime Minister Olmert, President Bush, Secretary-General Nasrallah, President al-Asad and President Ahmadinejad have all been procliaming [sic] the war a personal victory.

I don't know why they would want to claim it.

It was such a stupid war. It was thick-as-two-blocks-of-wood strategy on all sides. It was moronic for the Israelis to plan it out last year. It was idiotic for Hizbullah to cross over into Israel, kill soldiers, and take two captive. [Ed: there are considerable doubts on this description of events.] It was brain dead for the Israeli officer corps and politicians to think they could get anything positive out of bombing Lebanon back to the stone age and making a million people homeless. It was dim-witted for Hasan Nasrallah to threaten Israelis with releasing poison gases from Haifa chemical plants on them. It was obtuse for the Israelis to confront a dug-in guerrilla movement with green conventional troops marching in straight lines. It was dull of Hizbullah to fire thousands of katyushas into open fields where they mainly damaged wild grass. The few times when the rockets managed to kill someone, it was often an Arab Israeli civilian. Stupid.

Israeli's armed forces chief, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, unwisely sold off $27,000 in stock when he heard that Hizbullah had captured 2 Israeli soldiers. That wasn't unwise economically, since when Israel went to war, its stock market fell 12% It is further proof that the war was planned well in advance, and that Halutz knew that the capture would trigger it. But what could he have saved or made from this transaction? A few thousand dollars? It was stupid for him to risk the public perception of impropriety for such a small sum. Unprofessional.

[...]
But this war was a keystone cops war. It was horribly destructive for Lebanon, but not to any purpose for anyone, including the Israelis. The Americans and Israelis seem to have thought that the small farmers and small shopkeepers of south Lebanon were a sinister wraith army of the ghost of Ayatollah Khomeini. In fact, they were . . . small farmers and shopkeepers. One of the reasons they are rushing back down south is to see to their small farms, even if the small farmhouse isn't there any more.

But there you have it. Everyone wants credit for this cornucopia of foolishness.

Bush came out and said that Hizbullah had been defeated, and tried to link Hizbullah to the Sunni Arab guerrillas who make his life hell in Iraq. But, George, Hizbullah is Shiite. It was your Shiite allies in Iraq who supported it.

One event that stood out in my mind from early in the ground invasion was a complaint from an Israeli soldier that the Hezbollah fighters were deliberately wearing military uniforms to confuse them, because that made them look like soldiers. Hey Brainiac, that's what they are: soldiers.

I don't know what the Israeli brass thought, but the rank-and-file seem to have swallowed whole the myth of Hezbollah being untrained terrorists with machine guns. Maybe Israel really did expect to find Hezbollah fighters hiding in civilian clothes in markets and apartment buildings (and maybe the Pope is an atheist...) and was taken completely by surprise to discover Hezbollah troops were well-trained, disciplined light infantry, dug into heavily fortified, well-supplied positions far from the residential areas the Israeli airforce was blowing up.

It has been said, if you fight the weak, you become weak. Israeli soldiers have spent the last decade or two shooting rock-throwing Palestinian children, protecting bulldozers, and blowing up Hamas leaders with guided missiles. Whatever edge they once had has been dulled by their arrogant confidence that the IDF is the toughest, meanest military force in the Middle East and possibly the world. With total air superiority, heavy armour and a numerical superiority, they couldn't beat light infantry and failed to make a single one of their strategic aims. The best they can say after this is that, having picked a fight with the 40lb weakling next door, "we didn't get our butts kicked!"

Morally, ethically, Cole might be right that Hezbollah has nothing to be proud of here. (His assertion that they crossed into Israel and captured two soldiers is doubtful -- more details to follow soon.) Both sides have committed war crimes: Hezbollah by firing unguided rockets into farmland where they could -- and did -- hit civilians, and Israel by its application of collective punishment to the entire Lebanese people, its deliberate destruction of houses, factories, bridges, airports and other civilian infrastructure, and its killing of hundreds of civilians -- at best careless endangerment, at worst deliberate murder. Either way, a war crime.

But, militarily, there was a clear and obvious winner here, and it wasn't Israel. Victory isn't decided by casualties alone, and certainly not by civilian casualites. In the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, the suffering of ordinary Lebanese doesn't matter to either side.

It is bad enough that Olmert is a militaristic vicious thug who invaded a foreign state on the slimmest of pretenses, but he is an incompetent thug who couldn't even pull the job off. Not only has he failed to curb militant Fundamentalist forces in Lebanon, but he has embolded them, weakening the secular Lebanese government, perhaps fatally, undercutting their authority, handing moral authority and the support of virtually all of Lebanon (Christian, Druze, Shiite and Sunni) to Hezbollah.

Olmert may or may not be able to spin this for the domestic market as a great victory. The frightened people of Israel might even prefer Olmert's strutting tough-guy policy of "my way or a fist in the face" towards Hamas and Hezbullah over the alternatives of negotiation, diplomacy and compromise. But there is no doubt that his adventurism has weakened Israel's position in the Middle East and made them less safe and more insecure.

Who won the war?

Now that the fighting has (mostly) stopped in Lebanon, and the ceasefire seems to be holding, we should ask, who won the war?

Well, Israel claim to have invaded Lebanon to force Hezbollah to disarm. Hezbollah aren't disarmed, and managed to fire 250 rockets into Israel in the last day before the ceasefire.

Israel said their aim was to destroy Hezbollah as an effective force. Hezbollah has not fired a single rocket into Israel since the ceasefire, giving unmistakable evidence that they remain under effective command and are not just a bunch of untrained terrorists. They're soldiers who can follow orders. [Update, 18-08-06 11:15am: it seems that the ceasefire hasn't been kept quite so well as I thought. Both sides have claimed provocation and retaliation, including a handful of rockets fired ineffectually into Israel. But still, it is clear that Hezbollah is under effective command.]

Israel said that they were going to occupy southern Lebanon until Hezbollah was no longer a threat. Israel are withdrawing from Lebanon, and Hezbollah are still there, still armed, and still able to fight.

Israeli hardliners hoped to push the Lebanese people out of southern Lebanon, leaving the area depopulated and giving Israel a large buffer zone. Under the mythology of far-right Israel, the Lebanese and Palestinians are not attached to any particular piece of land. (Half a century of conflict over land hasn't taught Israeli wingnuts any different.) As soon as the ceasefire started, Lebonese farmers and shopkeepers began returning to their farms and what little was left of their homes.

Israel said they went to war to rescue the two captured soldiers, and would never negotiate for their return. The soldiers are still prisoners, and Israel have now said they will negotiate.

I have previously suggested that this war between Hezbollah and Israel is like Rocky: no matter what the judges say, the fact that the heavyweight champ Apollo Creed didn't cream the unknown in the first round made Rocky the winner. No matter how badly Rocky was beaten by the champ, he was still standing, bruised but unbowed. But in fact it is worse than that: despite a total lack of air support and heavy armour, Hezbollah was able to inflict significant loses on Israel while suffering surprisingly few loses themselves.

When a first-world army with air support and heavy armour takes on second-world ground troops, you should expect a ratio of 1:10 losses. In this war, the ratio was 1:4 according to Israel and 2:1 according to Hezbollah (as of the time of writing). Of the two, I consider the Israeli figure (barely) more reliable -- I'm assuming the true figure was one Israeli casulty taken for every two inflicted.

As Pat Lang writes:

A basic lesson of history is that one must win on the battlefield to dictate the peace. A proof of winning on the battlefield has always been possession of that battlefield when the shooting stops. Those who remain on the field are just about always believed to have been victorious. Those who leave the field are believed to be the defeated.

It is Israel, not Hezbollah, who is slinking off this battlefield.

British terrorism arrests driven by politics!

In further news, the Pope is Catholic and Keith Richards has been known to use drugs once in a while.

It seems that the arrests of the alleged British terrorists were driven more by politics than any actual threat. Wow. Whoever would have guessed? There were no bombs. The "terrorists" didn't have airline tickets. Most of them didn't even have passports. They were almost certainly a bunch of loud-mouthed goons talking big on Internet chat rooms.

When I was a young man, I used to have long telephone conversations with friends of mine where we would "plan" how to destroy aircraft, build nuclear bombs, seed reservoirs with toxic chemicals, and divert asteroids to crash into Moscow or Washington. Mostly it was an intellectual exercise -- "How can we build a rail-gun out of a PVC pipe, two magnets and an electric drill?" sort of nonsense. Obviously we did none of these things. It probably kept us sane during the insanity of adolescence. I think just about every male of a certain age (4 to 94) fantasises about destruction at times. But under today's political climate, we could be labeled "terrorists", kidnapped by masked soldiers from our beds, and disappeared to Poland or Pakistan to have electric shocks applied to our genitals until we confessed.

Confessed to what? Trust me, once those clamps are placed on your genitals, you'll be amazed at how imaginative you can become.

If we had been angry young men with a grudge, maybe we'd have talked about blowing up the Melbourne Cricket Ground in anger rather than in good humour. ("Batteries! A 9V battery has enough energy to vaporize a car if you could release it all at once!") But talk is cheap: no matter how many times we decided that we could make a fusion bomb out of thorium refined from sand, polystyrene and some dynamite, the honest truth was we had no way of building a H-bomb. And it is looking more and more unlikely that these angry British men could have made these fantasy hair gel bombs, no matter how much they talked about it.

Tens or hundreds of thousands of travellers stranded at airports for days. At least ten thousand pieces of luggage lost. Thousands of iPods, books, pens, mobile phones and other items just thrown away by the airlines, without compensation for the owners (that's theft, right?). A shock to the British economy. Chaos. Fear. And terror.

The terrorists did their job well, spreading terror across not only the UK but across the world. Only the terrorists weren't the British Muslims. They were the British or American politicians who apparently leaned on the police to rush the arrests, the airlines that panicked, and the media who not only accepted the story uncritically but did their best to beat it up into an even bigger story.

See also my earlier posts here and here.

What can anthropology contribute to policy?

Mark Kleinman of The Reality Based Community discusses what anthropologists need to do to be taken seriously by policy makers:

1. Adopt a scientific perspective. I see no reason why anyone outside the rarefied world of academia should pay any attention to the work of scholars who argue that facts are unknowable, theories are untestable, or framing, perspective, and interpretation are all that count.


2. Eliminate political agendas from research. Policy makers seek to base their decisions on reliable observations. [Ed: Ha ha ha ha!]


3. Broaden the scope of the peoples investigated. Anthropology has a remarkable methodological tool kit at its disposable. Why is it that anthropologists feel compelled to focus on the smallest, oddest, or most marginal groups within any given nation-state?


4. Read, understand, and communicate with scholars in the broader world of behavioral science.

See here for further details.

Pirate Bay

Wired News has an interesting article about the copyright dissenters of Pirate Bay in Sweden:

[Founder Gottfrid Svartholm] chose the name Pirate Bay to make clear what the site was there for: no shame, no subtlety. These people were pirates. They believed the existing copyright regime was a broken artifact of a pre-digital age, the gristle of a rotting business model that poisoned culture and creativity. The Pirate Bay didn't respect intellectual property law, and they'd say it publicly.

[...] the Bay's first defining feature: a gallery of threatening letters sent in by lawyers for movie studios, video-game makers and other rights holders, side-by-side with the crew's mocking replies. For Peter, that's when the Pirate Bay became part of a movement, and Neij is still obviously proud of the effort. "They are rude in a polite way," he says. "We are rude in a rude way back at them."
[...]
Against this backdrop, the Pirate Bay crested the world of file sharing through attrition. One by one, most of the peer-to-peer networks went away. (LimeWire, one of the few survivors, was sued by the RIAA last week.) BitTorrent tracker search engines fell next -- sites like Suprnova.org and Elite Torrents crumbled under legal threats and raids. The remaining few, including Isohunt and TorrentSpy, now have policies of removing torrents for infringing content upon request. They're being sued anyway.

That leaves the Pirate Bay as the lone civil dissenter. It neither operates in a black market nor lays claim to a loophole of international law. Like its progenitor organization, Piratbyran, the administrators of the Pirate Bay believe the law is wrong.

Proof of the FSM's existence

Can anyone dispute the Flying Spaghetti Monster's existence after this?


Click image for larger view; original hi-res image here. Source here.

War on Hair Gel

Details of the "intelligence" that caught the alleged terrorists planning the hair gel bombs is starting to come out. It seems that the information that the terrorists were using hair gel to make their bombs was extracted by torture in Pakistan.

As Cory Doctorow writes:

"Please stop electrocuting my testicles! What? Only if I reveal a -- OWWWWWW -- terrorist plot -- AAAAAAHH? All right -- SCREEEECH! -- the terrorists will be blowing up a plane with, with, oh man, I don't know, hair gel! Yes! Hair gel!"

Direct link to Craig Murray's (former UK ambassador to the Republic of Uzbekistan) analysis here. Quote:

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports [...]

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.

It is important to remember that this is not the first -- nor will it be the last -- "terrorist plot" uncovered in the UK. Remember the plot to make Ricin? Nothing came of that: one suspect was found guilty of murder for stabbing a policeman. But there was no Ricin. The strongest case the government had (apart from the murder charge) was "conspiracy to make a public nuisance". Some terrorists.

It was a storm in a teacup, but it accomplished it's purpose: keep the public scared so they'll give power to Stalinists like U.K. Home Secretary John Reid. Over one thousand British Muslims have been arrested under anti-terrorist legislation. Just twelve percent are ever charged with any crime. Eighty percent of those are aquitted. Out of the thousand people arrested, just two percent -- twenty -- have actually been found guilty, and not a single one of those has been for terrorism-related crimes.

Heathrow chaos

Boing Boing have a couple of posts detailing the sheer incompetence and idiocy of the airlines in the UK following the latest terrorism threat.

They link to a blog by "Tango" describing his three days of misery stuck at Heathrow. Lowlights include his flight being cancelled, then being flow empty to its scheduled destination, where it picked up passengers and continued on its way; airlines unable to re-book passengers' tickets at the ticket counter unless they phoned; two to three hour waits for each security check, with most people going through three or more checks; and bags and bags of people's personal property been thrown away by the airlines, including mobile phones, iPods, cameras, books, even jewellery.

("Look, it's a book! Pages made of paper! Here, I'll flip through it, you can even check it yourself!"

"Could be a bomb disguised as a book. With exploding ink.")

But at least people are safer, right?

No. At the height of the security alert, a twelve year old boy managed to get a seat on a plane without going through security, or even having a ticket. The economy disrupted by tens of millions of dollars, at least ten thousand pieces of lost luggage, and actual security was improved not one whit.

Boing Boing also discusses the likelihood of the alleged terrorist bombs working. At least the airports are keeping us safe from twelve years of research about Shakespeare being smuggled onto our planes.

AOL digging for gold

You couldn't make this stuff up... AOL has got a court order allowing them to dig up a spammer's parents' yard looking for gold and platinum bars.

AOL believe, and have convinced a judge, that the spammer has converted his ill-gained fortune into bullion, which he then buried at his parents' farm.

Google says no more googling

I like Google™. I am critical of their actions sometimes, but in general they are one of the less evil of the big corporations. But sometimes they need to learn the lesson of King Canute: you can't keep the tide from coming in.

Google Inc. has been sending nastygrams to media organisations, warning them to stop using google as a verb.

Sorry guys, but the tide has come in. Google is now listed in at least three dictionaries, two in English and one in Japanese. In two of those, "google" is listed as a verb. Google Inc., like so many before them (elevator, escalator, zipper...) is a victim of their own success: google has become a generic term for "search the Internet". Of course, Google Inc. has to try to defend their trademark, and no doubt there is a difference between Google™ the noun and google the verb. But for a company whose corporate motto is "Don't Be Evil", Google Inc. need to actually, um, stop being evil. If Hormel Foods Corporation can distinguish between Spam™ the tasty food-like product and spam the evil unsolicited email, Google Inc. can stop trying to stop the tide from coming in too.

Oh, and guys... your website is full of dozens of references to "Google" with nary an trademark ™ or registered trademark ® symbol to be seen. There's a ™ on the Google logo, and that's about it. Sloppy, real sloppy. That's the sort of thing that will convince a judge that you aren't really serious about your trademarks.

At least Google Inc. can take cold comfort in the fact that though competitors will (soon) be able to talk about "googling the Web for something using Acme.Search.Com" the owner of google.com will have a huge advantage over their competitors.

All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. But google as a verb is generic, sorry guys. Get over it.

Apple versus the whiners

Nat from O'Reilly discusses the complaints from Mac users that Apple has added software to OS X that duplicates the functionality of third party applications.

Interestingly, it doesn't seem to be the third party developers who are ragging on Apple for doing this -- even if they stand to lose money. It's just business, and software development never stays still. Your application can be the greatest Must Have one day, and a pointless waste of time the next.

It should be obvious that features don't ensure survival for very long. Business isn't a single hand of poker, it's an endless deck. If you make something clever, I can copy it. If I can copy it, what's your advantage? It's in being first in to build name, it's in customer service, it's in marketing, it's in customer allegiance or lock-in, it's in the overall strength of your product. And, most critically, it's in the lead that you have built. While I'm copying your feature, you should be building the next one. A brilliant Perl friend of mine, Jarkko Hietaniemi, has as his .sig a quote from Jack Cohen: "There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'." This could just as equally apply to the software business.

Another record for Microsoft

PC Pro is reporting that the number of security vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft have broken their previous record.

The number of critical flaws in Microsoft software has hit a record high, offering a prime opportunity for hackers to exploit the backlog of unprotected vulnerabilities, according to security experts.

So far this year, the software giant has already addressed more critical vulnerabilities than in 2004 and 2005 combined, according to security specialist McAfee.

In further news, Paul Thurrott, writing for Windows IT Pro, describes Internet Explorer 7 as "a cancer" and recommends that both developers and end-users avoid it:

My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators.

How things have changed. It wasn't that long ago that you couldn't find a more pro-Microsoft journalist than Paul Thurrott.

Pictures that lie

News.com is running a pictorial report on photo manipulation. The old cliche "the camera never lies" is not true any more, and possibly never was.

There is also an interesting article about software that is being developed which can detect photo-manipulated images by looking for discrepencies in lighting and statistical anomalies at the pixel level.

Photo manipulation is (potentially) big business: as Gartner analyst L. Frank Kenney points out, the potential commercial and political gains from faked photos are huge:

"How much is the presidency of a country worth, or control of a company? People tend not to read the retractions," he said. "Once the stuff is indelibly embedded in your memory, it is tough to get out."

It is interesting to see the difference in photo manipulation strategies during recent American elections. For example, there were no shortage of photoshopped pictures of President Bush carrying "Presidenting For Dummies" or pretending to read books upside down: silly and obvious fakes. On the other hand, somebody faked a photo of John Kerry together with hated anti-Vietnam war protestor "Hanoi Jane" Fonda. Nobody really thinks George W. Bush can't tell when a book is upside down -- that's satire. But a photo of presidential candidate Kerry apparently sharing a podium with the woman who millions of Americans still consider a traitor... that goes beyond satire into outright dishonesty. If you can't find mud to sling, fake some.

I must admit I was rather disappointed with the manipulated images chosen by News.com. Too many of them were obvious fakes (which is not the same as being bad fakes) and the political implications were merely implied rather than discussed.

If you want to see highly imaginative and excellent quality photoshopped images, you could do far worse than to visit Worth1000.com and check out the contests. The possibilities are shown by entries like Paris Hilton's newest pet:


or Bishop Hugh Hefner:



[Click on images for full view]

An epidemic of isolated events

Mark Kleiman from The Reality-Based Community links to a study from the right-wing Cato Institute (no tree-hugging touchy-feely lefties there!) about the paramilitary and SWAT aspects of drug-law enforcement. In particular the euphemistic "dynamic entry" and "no-knock" (that is, smash the door down and burst in with guns drawn) raids on people's homes. In 2001, there were forty thousand paramilitary raids across the USA, mainly on drug raids, but also for everything down to domestic disputes and complaints about noisy dogs. The Cato study shows that in a depressingly large number of cases the raids are based on incorrect information and innocent people are terrorised, threatened, shot and even killed by the police who are supposed to protect them.

And not just poor blacks either: incredibly, one major target of paramilitary policing is doctors who are suspected of prescribing "too many" painkillers. Heaven forbid that people should have relief from chronic pain. (Who should decide how many painkillers are "too many" -- the doctor who knows his patients, or some faceless bureacrat in the DEA? Why, the guy with the heavily armed paramilitary SWAT team of course.)

The detailed study, with more than thirty-five pages of case studies and fifteen pages of references, can be downloaded for free here, or a hard copy purchased from here.

There is a dynamic map available on-line [note: requires Javascript] which clearly shows what the author of the study calls "an epidemic of 'isolated incidents'". In most cases, no-one on the law enforcement side was held accountable for their actions, and there is no effort to learn from these 'isolated incidents'.

Not only are police almost never disciplined or held accountable for shooting innocent people, but homeowners who have shot police thinking they were home intruders have been treated with the full fury of the law, up to and including the death penalty. Despite having their houses broken into at 3am, often with no warning at all, and being woken from deep sleep by masked gunmen, homeowners are expected to have superhuman levels of composure and good judgement. Meanwhile, the SWAT teams themselves are encouraged to have a culture of macho, swaggering cruelty: in one botched raid on an innocent household, police accidently set fire to the house, then in front of the owner, Andrea Baker, chased her dog back into the burning house with fire extinguishers. The dog was burnt to death, and the house burnt to the ground, putting neighbouring houses at risk. And the result? One person was arrested for outstanding traffic fines. Another day at work by America's Finest, keeping the streets safe.

One of the clear motives of these paramilitary raids is outright theft by city governments under forfeiture laws: under American law, if you are raided by the police under suspicion of drug crimes, your money and property can be seized by the government, even if you are never convicted of any crime. The money stolen in this way is not insignificant: in just one small American town, El Monte in California, the police force gained $4.5 million in ten years from forfeited property. Not small change however you look at it, and a huge incentive for chronically underfunded police forces with expensive SWAT forces to support. Why raise taxes when you can just steal the money you need? Everybody hates tax increases, but only criminals poor blacks white trash the working class white collar families the living need fear the police.

Wikipedia and science

It never ceases to amaze me how people just don't get Wikipedia. Not just any old people, but those who you would expect to grok the concept often have the most difficulty with it.

Case in point: economist Stephen J. Dubner of Freakonomics has written a blog post entitled "More Welcome Ridicule For Wikipedia". A tad hostile, don't you think?

First he damns it with faint praise:

Wikipedia is generally fun, sometimes useful, often entertaining. What it isn’t is very dependable, for the very reason that makes it fun: it is an encyclopedia whose content is generated by random contributors.

Then he links to a "a better job of ridiculing Wikipedia than we could ever dream."

Hardly the first time Dubner has attacked Wikipedia. What's prompted this new attack?

Comedian Stephen Colbert ran amuck on American television, attacking and defacing Wikipedia entries. Hardy har har.

Of course, neither Dubner nor Colbert mention that the system worked: Colbert's vandalism was detected rapidly and reversed.

I'm forced to wonder what it is about Wikipedia that's eating Dubner. The Wikipedia system has striking similarities to the way free markets work. Anyone can go into business as a supplier of information in Wikipedia, just as anyone can go into business as a supplier of goods and services in a free market. In both, these suppliers vary greatly in quality; in both, there is no centralised "expert" who decides what is good and what is bad; in both, there are problems with cheats and vandals. One shouldn't discount the free market and institute central planning because of problems with, say, polluters. One creates systems that control or limit the problems. Free markets have laws which punish polluters, or "sin taxes" which make polluting industries pay for their anti-social activities. Wikipedia has revision control.

As an economist, no doubt Dubner could talk for hours about the emergent properties of free markets, and how the "random contributors" to the market create dependable supply and demand of goods and services without any central planner "expert" who decides what suppliers should supply or where investors should put their money. So why is he so resistant to the idea that "random contributors" to Wikipedia can lead to emergent properties of reliability, accuracy and accountability?

Had Stephen Colbert run a coffee shop and, for a lark, started putting powerful laxatives in the food and drink he served to customers, would Dubner claim this was "welcome ridicule for capitalism"? No of course not -- he'd surely point out that market economies don't collapse because of the actions of a few malicious or stupid sellers, and that buyers would rapidly learn that Colbert was providing tainted goods and they'd avoid his store, sending him broke. The free market's feedback loops are slow: likely it would take weeks or months before Colbert's dodgy store was shut down. Compare that to the Wikipedia system, which locked the vandalised articles within twenty minutes. (Of course, not all vandalism is detected that quickly. The higher the profile of the article, the more likely vandalism will be detected quickly; but the lower the profile, the less likely anyone will bother vandalising it.)

But there is another similarity to Wikipedia's open content that is even stronger than the free market. That is science. Like Wikipedia, science operates by consensus and peer review. There are experts in science, but it your peers' respect that proclaims you "expert", not merely your paper qualifications -- there are many Ph.D.s but they are not all held in the same regard, and some of the greatest scientists never held formal qualifications. Likewise, not all Wikipedia editors are equal. There is no central committee that decides scientific truth, instead there is an open market in ideas, just like in Wikipedia.

Science is transparent: much of the scientific consensus emerges from public debates in journals which are open for anyone to subscribe to. But while science also includes private debates behind the closed doors of offices and laboratories, Wikipedia is completely open: virtually everything is debated in public, with the debates recorded in the Talk pages and the editing history of the articles recorded for anyone to see. Wikipedia is even more transparent than science. For those who wish to take the time to dig under the surface, Wikipedia gives the reader the means to judge the reliability of every sentence.

You can't say the same thing about Encyclopædia Britannica. You're reduced to a take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards the articles: you either trust everything in the encyclopædia, or you trust nothing. You either trust Britannica's status as an expert source, or you don't. You can't easily determine whether this particular editor or that writer has an axe to grind, you simply have to trust that they don't. (Britannica has a good reputation for a reason, so that trust is probably not misplaced -- but you're still taking them on trust.)

Like science, Wikipedia emphasises how do you know rather than who are you -- and I suspect that's what is eating Dubner. The old authoritarian impulse at work perhaps? "Obey my authori-tay!" Both science and Wikipedia demand references, and reliable ones at that, and give no credence to people based only on "qualifications". Both operate through peer review rather than executive fiat. That's hard for some people to deal with, even some scientists.

There's a further similarity between Wikipedia and science that is amusing. In the early days of the Royal Society, there were many amateurs -- actually they were all amateurs -- and meetings often became extremely heated as people passionately argued at each other for their own unsupported ideas. Sounds just like Wikipedia during "edit wars". Nevertheless, from this unpromising start, the scientific demand for evidence rather than "expert authority" won out. In fact, a close look at the history of science shows that periods of reliance on authority have resulted in a reduction in reliability and accuracy, and for much the same reason as centralised planning usually leads to inefficient allocation of resources.

Free markets work because of, not in spite of, lots of ordinary business people. Science works because of, not in spite of, lots of ordinary scientists who aren't neccesarily leading experts in their fields. And likewise, Wikipedia doesn't depend on experts, although experts are always welcome for the depth of their knowledge and their understanding of the need for evidence and references. Wikipedia doesn't need experts because of who they are, but because of what they know. Anybody who knows what an expert knows, even if it is only a tiny little bit of what an expert knows, can contribute and help the incremental emergence of knowledge.

Bad laws

At work, we had a small email discussion about the Australian Census, during which I mentioned that people don't have any moral obligation to obey bad laws (although of course they have to be prepared to face the consequences).

One of the people on the mailing list, let me call him John (not his real name) replied that there are no bad laws, and that we all have a moral as well as legal obligation to obey all laws simply because they are the law. He wrote:

There is no such thing as a "bad" law. A law is a law and has to be obeyed. No matter if you dont [sic] agree with it.

Can you say "baaaa"?

"No such thing as a bad law" is the attitude of people who turned in their neighbours to the Gestapo because the law said that "mixed race" marriages between Germanics and Jews or Slavs was a capital offence. That's the attitude of those who treated black people as property, because the law said that those with black skin were property. That's the attitude of those who defend their war crimes with "I was only following orders" -- and I should point out that international law does not allow "following orders" to excuse crimes against humanity.

That's the attitude of those who let other people do their thinking for them, instead of considering the consequences of their actions.

It has been said that, for evil to triumph, all it takes is for good people to do nothing. That's bad enough, but when people actively help evil because "its the law", well, you can't do evil and be good.

In the history of human civilization, more lasting misery and harm has been done by people obeying evil laws than by people breaking good ones. Breaking good laws is self-limiting: there is no shortage of people prepared to try and stop the common criminal who breaks good laws, and there are penalties and punishments to encourage people to obey good laws.

But there are few who are prepared to stand up to the punishment for breaking a bad law. If John had said "I wish I could ignore or break bad laws, but I'm too scared" I could respect that. But to ignore the consequences of laws, to declare that all laws are equal, is worse than foolish. It's wicked.

There are countries, such as Nigeria, where it is almost impossible to convict rapists under their interpretation of sharia. For example, according to Jan Goodwin's Price of Honour, under Pakistani law rape can only be proven by the word of three good Muslim male witnesses. In these countries, a complaint of rape is treated as an admission of adultery unless proven otherwise -- and no amount of forensic evidence is sufficient to prove rape unless three men witnessed it and are willing to testify. And adultery is often punished by death.

John would have us believe that laws which punish the rapist are no better than laws which protect the rapist and execute the victim. John would tell us that if he lived in Nigeria, or Iran or Saudi Arabia, and he came home to find his grandmother beaten half to death and raped, he would see it as his duty to call the police to report his grandmother for the crime of adultery. After all, it's the law.

(And don't think that it is only those "mad bad Muslims" who create bad laws. Stalin, Mussolini, Pinochet, Pol Pot, to name just a few, were not Muslim. And even "good" societies make bad laws, like "Zero Tolerance".)

If you, like John, can live with that moral relativism, with the idea than any act no matter how heinous becomes morally beyond approach because some evil dictator or ignorant committee declares it the law, then you are actively helping make the world a meaner, crueler, badder place.

DRM Wars: Return of the Sith

Professor Ed Felten of Freedom To Tinker discusses signs that the debate over DRM is about to shift away from copyright.

For the last few years, proponents of Digital Restrictions Management software have claimed that it was all about enforcing copyrights. Opponents of DRM have observed that this was transparently false: DRM is more than just copy protection, which doesn't work. Bits, by their very nature, are copyable. Trying to make bits uncopable is like trying to make water not wet. DRM is more about controlling access to information, not about protecting copyright.

But, despite DRM, there is no shortage of copies of protected content available on the Internet. As Felten says:

The usual argument in favor of bolstering DRM is that DRM retards peer-to-peer copyright infringement. This argument has always been bunk — every worthwhile song, movie, and TV show is available via P2P, and there is no convincing practical or theoretical evidence that DRM can stop P2P infringement. Policymakers have either believed naively that the next generation of DRM would be different, or accepted vague talk about speedbumps and keeping honest people honest.

It seems that the music and movie companies and the policymakers have started to realise that water is wet DRM-as-copy-protection doesn't work. Consequently, DRM advocates are switching to two new arguments: price discrimination and lock-in. Naturally, they're in favour of both. Naturally, consumers (as well as many suppliers!) are opposed to both.

The first argument is that DRM allows suppliers to price discriminate -- charge different customers different amounts for the same product -- and that this is good for society.

The second is that DRM allows suppliers to lock their customers in to a single supplier, and naturally this too is supposed to be good for society.

And, naturally, these free market capitalists want the threat of government force to protect their efforts to disciminate and lock-in customers. Heaven forbid that they sell their crippled products in a truly free market, one where consumers are free to remove the DRM if they don't want it. You paid for it, you own it and can do anything you want with it, right? Not if the DRM advocates get their way. In their world, it's "you paid for it, we control it, if you don't like it, tough".

Like Felten, I'm going to skip over the merits and limitations of these two arguments for now, and merely observe that the DRM advocates' rhetoric is moving away from the P2P bogeyman and towards these "greed is good" arguments. (One might speculate whether or not the record labels' hopes to use P2P technologies for distributing music is one of the reasons they're cutting back on the "Napster and Kazaa are evil" rhetoric.)

Felten observes:

Interestingly, these new arguments have little or nothing to do with copyright. The maker of almost any product would like to price discriminate, or to lock customers in to its product. Accordingly, we can expect the debate over DRM policy to come unmoored from copyright, with people on both sides making arguments unrelated to copyright and its goals.

If the music and movie companies succeed in having consumer lock-in elevated to a legally-protected right, expect this disease to spread. It might not happen overnight, but eventually manufacturers of all sorts will demand a piece of the pie. Next will be printer manufacturers, who will demand protection against competitors who make compatible print cartridges. (That's a dead cert: they've already tried.) Car manufacturers, in partnership with tire manufacturers, could easily use RFID technology so that the car would refuse to start if the "wrong" brand of tires was put on. As more and more consumer products become computerised, we might easily find that we can do less and less with them.

This will be a very interesting time indeed. I'd like to think that if the false platitudes of the pigopolists get stripped away revealing their naked greed, there will be fewer well-meaning but naive politicians supporting them.

Yeah, I think that's funny too.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself

The right-wing think-tank The Cato Institute has a detailed, exhaustively researched research paper on the risks of terrorism. The paper's author, John Mueller of the Ohio State University, has documented statistics about the risks and trends of terrorism.

The bottom line is very simple: terrorism doesn't kill many people. The essential aim of terrorism is to create terror. As the paper points out:

Terrorists can be defeated simply by not becoming terrorized -- that is, anything that enhances fear effectively gives in to them.

What a difference between Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said we had nothing to fear but fear itself, and George W. Bush and his meaningless colour-coded fear-mongering. ("Today's Terrorism Alert is RED - high chance of nuclear explosions in New York and Washington, with occasional car bombs from the north and north-west. People in alpine areas should use snow chains and armour-plating on their cars.")

We've been lucky enough that our politicians have understood this, and (apart from the shameful treatment of refugees as if each and every one of them was virtually a convicted terrorist) have not talked the terrorism threat up. In the USA though, things are very different, with the government, aided and abetted by the right-wing media like Fox News, cynically talking up the terrorism threat, spreading fear and terror, doing everything possible to convince the population that their lives, their very country, was in imminent threat of destruction. As Cory Doctorow says:

[...] by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified.

Via Bruce Scheier and Cory Doctorow.

Lock down that printer

Bruce Schneier has a timely reminder that one of the most vulnerable parts of any computer network is the printer. Printers are computers. Many of them are running Windows themselves, but even if they're not, no software is perfectly secure.

He's got my vote

What's bad is good

Developing Intelligence reviews Steven Johnson's book, "Everything Bad Is Good For You".

"Everything Bad" makes the provocative and controversial claim that the changes to popular culture over the last fifty years which have been decried by many as signs of the demise of society and the collapse of civilization (think music videos and sound-bites) are reponsible for the drastic increases in IQ seen over the last century.

The significant upward shifts in IQ over the last fifty or sixty years have never been explained satisfactorily. Johnson's book suggests that the every-increasing speed of pop culture forces us all, but especially children, to engage in mental calisthenics, so to speak.

Detainee deaths

The human rights group The Edmund Rice Centre, is reporting that at least nine asylum seekers who were sent back to Afghanistan by the Australian government have been killed on their return. In addition, three children of asylum seekers who were sent back to Afghanistan from Nauru have also been killed.

At least two of the asylum seekers were murdered by the local militia (a polite word for "armed mob with automatic weapons and pretentions of being in the army"), while some of the others were killed when their houses were bombed.

Of course the government ministers who rejected claims that the asylum seekers' lives would be in danger if they were sent back, are putting on a brave face, arguing that they had no way of knowing that the people's lives were in danger if they went back to Afghanistan.

Gosh. We send people back into a country where armed militias are settling old scores and murdering those who are insufficiently religious, where terrorists set off bombs deliberately targetting civilians, where terrorists in uniforms occupying military forces fire missiles at houses, and they get killed. Even Blind Freddie could have seen that coming.

Deano in trouble

Former Aussie cricketeer Dean "Deano" Jones has been sacked from his job as commentator today, after being caught on air calling South African cricketeer Hashim Amia "the terrorist". Cynics might suggest that Jones' punishment was more for being foolish enough to use the slur on-air, rather than for the slur itself.

According to the Melbourne free tabloid MX, Jones apologised before leaving Sri Lanka, where the incident occurred: "I have no end of respect for the Muslim faith -- that's why I'm so sorry at making such a stupid comment."

Why do people pretend to have respect for religious faiths when they clearly and obviously don't? Why didn't Jones come clean and admit that what he said was a slur and potentially slanderous, no different from calling somebody a murderer or a criminal based on their religious belief, without having to dress it up in false pious respect for a religion he almost certainly knows nothing about and cares for even less?

Imagine if he had said, "What I called Hashim Amia was an insult and an slur against him. It is factually untrue. There is no evidence he has committed crimes of terrorism, and I was stupid and foolish to suggest he had, based only on his religion, without any good cause."

That's what it should be about, surely. An innocent man was slandered. His religion was the excuse, but it was an attack against him, not an attack against Islam. That people take it as such just shows how much unwarranted respect we give religion. Had Hashim Amia been an atheist, or a Christian, or a Buddhist, we'd have no trouble recognising that accusing him of crimes he hasn't committed is an attack against him.

The idea that we should respect religions has a pernicious effect on our thinking. We're living in a Bizarro World where a person's beliefs are given infinite respect and the person none. Millions of people (and I'm predicting that Dean Jones is one of them) think it would be perfectly acceptable to kidnap Hashim Amia out of his bed, fly him secretly half-way across the world to a secret prison, and torture him with an electric drill, on the suspicion that he was a "terrist" -- but insult his religion? Never!

I'm sure that Dean Jones, a clean-shaven man, has no respect for the idea that the (assumed) All-Powerful, All-Wise, All-Knowing Creator of the Universe cares deeply whether men cut their beard or not. That's so Howard Hughes. Is God an obsessive-compulsive control-freak? It certainly would seem so, judging by the things which His believers claim are important. God, so they would have you believe, cares deeply about how long you grow your hair and (for men) beard, whether you wear a hat or not, whether your clothes are made of a single fibre or a mixture of two (mixing linen and cotton is a mortal sin, according to the Old Testament). He cares about what you eat, when you eat it, how you prepare the food.

And let's not even mention sex...

How can anyone respect any religion, whether it is Christianity, Islam or any other, that describes the All-Powerful Creator as something like a creepy, obsessive, dirty old man with anger-management issues?

Census irony

Tonight is Census night in Australia. Ironically, the public face of the census, entertainer Ernie Dingo, wasn't legally allowed to be included in the Census until 1971 because he is native Australian Aboriginal. Not surprisingly, the government isn't making a big deal of this little bit of recent Australian history.

As the Australian newspaper writes:

The 50-year-old entertainer is unwilling to make a song and dance about the stunning irony of an Aborigine promoting the nation's statistical snapshot that excluded him from the 1961 and 1966 censuses. "I don't know why people don't mention things that may be an embarrassment to them," he told The Australian with a grin yesterday.

Personally, I think that this is a fact which should be trumpeted far and wide, not swept under the carpet. We've come so far. True, we're no angels, and we've got a lot further to go before we as a culture stop judging people on the colour of their skin rather than their actions, but we've made a lot of progress.

Mysterious big cats

Darren Naish discusses the evidence for anomalous big cats(ABCs) in the UK. He warns that there is a lot of stigma against the study of ABCs, with academics often thinking it is a crackpot field inhabited by the lunatic fringe. Nevertheless, there is a surprising amount of good solid evidence for the existence of big cats (some of which aren't really that big) living wild in the UK, and by implication, other places.

It’s often said that, if ABCs are real, then why don’t we have good photos, why don’t we have dead bodies, why don’t we have captured live animals, and why don’t we have definitive track and sign evidence? Well, the news is that we do have good photos, we do have dead bodies, we do have captured live animals, and we do have definitive track and sign evidence. This data is out there for anyone that’s prepared to examine it. Why isn’t this more widely known? That’s the mystery. The negative stigma attached to the subject seems to mean that the good data doesn’t really get out, at least to those people who haven’t gone to the trouble of immersing themselves in the subject.

On the dead bodies:

They include several Jungle cats Felis chaus, five Leopard cats Prionailurus bengalensis, and a Eurasian lynx Lynx lynx, shot dead in East Sussex in 1991 (Shuker 1995). The lynx is particularly interesting as the case was pretty much kept quiet until 2001. I don’t hold much faith in conspiracy theories, but the farmer who shot this animal was told by the police to keep it to himself. In fact it’s not difficult to think that, if any official body (say, the police, or the government) does know that ABCs are an undoubted reality, they will likely not want this to become widely known.

One has to wonder about the mentality of the officials. What did they think would happen? Riots in the streets because, horror upon horrors, there was a lynx on the loose? Piddly little cover-ups of this sort create a general distrust of officials and the expectation that "they're lying to us" that is far worse than the consequences of honesty.

The fascinating thing is just how adaptable these cats are. One of the most specialist tropical cats in the world, a Clouded Leopard, escaped from Howletts Zoo in 1975 and survived in good condition for nine months until it was shot. It certainly gives added credibility to the hypothesis that pet cougars had escaped from American gold miners and established breeding colonies in Australia.

Sea snakes and plesiosaurs

Darren Naish's Tetrapod Zoology blog has a fascinating discussion about the surprising sea snakes, and how they are like tiny (well, not always so tiny) plesiosaurs without flippers.

When carnivores kill

Possibly for the first time ever, a British wildlife documentary has recently shown an uncensored kill by a big carnivore. Prompted by this, Darren Naish discusses the sometimes horrifying cruelty of carnivores.

Big cats like leopards and lions are often very good at killing their prey quickly, but sometimes things go wrong, and even the most skillful killer had to learn how to kill efficiently and quickly, and some species of carnivore just don't bother. They simply eat their prey alive.

While nature isn’t all red in tooth and claw as some people like to say, predation is often decidedly unpretty, and compassion is a human trait. We might not like the idea that predators sometimes start eating their prey while it’s still alive, but the fact that it happens is an interesting facet of their behaviour as worthy of knowing as any other.

It is also a literally bloody reminder of the fact that human civilization is a constant effort to get away from nature. Nature is cruel and uncaring, and filled with actively hostile species out to eat you. "Getting back to nature" would be, if taken literally, almost certainly a slow and lingering death sentence. It is easy to admire "nature" when all the big carnivores and dangerous animals have been wiped out, when you don't have to stay there long enough to be troubled by parasites. What most people consider "nature" is little more than an untidy garden.

I am glad there are wild lions and hyenas. A world without them would be a lesser world. But I'm even more glad that I don't have to live amongst them.

Continued fractions

Mark C. Chu-Carroll from Good Math Bad Math has a nice explanation of continued fractions, what they are and why they are useful.

I like continued fractions. They're neat and full of wonderful properties. They are the basis of a lovely little algorithm for converting arbitrary decimal numbers into fractions. There are some great patterns in continued fractions too, like the square root of two. sqrt(2) can't be written exactly as a simple fraction, and the decimal expansion is messy: 1.414213... it goes on for ever, and despite the first couple of 14s there's no pattern to it.

But write it as a continued fraction and you'll see a wonderful pattern:

1 + 1/(2+ 1/(2+ 1/(2 + 1/(2 + ... )))

which can be written as [1; 2, 2, 2, 2, ...].

You want the reciprocal of sqrt(2)? That's easy: [0; 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, ...]. Or, expanding it:

0 + 1/(1 + 1/(2+ 1/(2+ 1/(2 + 1/(2 + ... )))

The rule for forming the reciprocal of a continued fraction is simple. If the whole number part (the first number, before the semicolon) is 0, you remove it and shift all the numbers one to the left. If it isn't zero, you shift all the numbers to the right by one, and stick a 0 as the whole number part.

Flying monkeys

Darren Naish from Tetrapod Zoology discusses whether bats are primates. Unfortunately, the evidence for macro-bats and primates being part of a single clade is slim and unconvincing. But We flightless primates reveals that the latest DNA evidence suggests that bats aren't a single clade (a group of animals related by direct descent): apparently neither the micro-bats nor the macro-bats are monophyletic.

More surprisingly, the evidence suggests that the common ancestor of both primates and at least some bats was likely to have been able to fly. This suggests that primates have evolved from flying mammals:

[...] in other words that primates are secondarily flightless. That’s right: you and me, and other apes, and lemurs, tarsiers and monkeys all descend from flying, winged proto-primates.

We're flightless bats! (Not quite, and by not quite I mean not at all. But it sounds cool.)

Best movie ever, yarrr.

PZ Myers, who first thought he would be curmudgeonly and hate it, has declared Pirates of the Caribbean II the Best. Movie. Evar.

The plot careered around like a drunken sailor, and made very little sense. [...]

Still...Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was terrific fun. It's got pirates, a squid-man, a giant squid, a crew of undead human-sea creature hybrids, random sword fights, a giant squid crushing ships, the cutest little animated barnacles, a giant squid eating people, very poor dental hygiene, and it just never stops. I'd been warned that it was over-long, but seriously, I got to the end and thought, "It's done? Already?"

[...] The character of Elizabeth is showing signs of dissatisfaction with that piece of damp cardboard, Will Turner. I think you can all see where this is going: I predict that in the final movie, Elizabeth will finally meet Davy, she'll fall in love at first sight, she'll win his heart, and they'll sail off into the sunset, where they'll spawn many squidlets together. Yeah, it's predictable, but this is the kind of movie that just has to have a happy ending.

I loved that movie. The last few seconds of the movie, back at the voodoo priestess' hut (you know the scene, the one with the apple), had me bouncing in my seat going "Squee squee squee!!!" like a 13-year-old fangirl.

But in a manly, pirately way, you understand. Yarrr.

The NORAD tapes

The USAF has, finally, released the live tapes of the events of NORAD's response to the September 11 attacks, and Vanity Fair has the story. Including the actual recordings.

Assuming the tapes are legitimate -- they almost certainly are genuine, but how much more confident would we be if they had been released immediately instead of six years later? -- NORAD responded to the hijackings as well as could possibly be expected to. They didn't shoot down the fourth plane, although they were prepared to. The evidence is strong that they tried, desperately, to cover-up just how badly prepared they were, but given the wrong information and the shameful lack of communication from the airlines, they did everything anyone could have asked for.

Except stop the attacks.

It's a story that was intentionally obscured, some members of the 9/11 commission believe, by military higher-ups and members of the Bush administration who spoke to the press, and later the commission itself, in order to downplay the extent of the confusion and miscommunication flying through the ranks of the government.

The Vanity Fair reporter explicitly accepts one coincidence theory:

The fact that there was an exercise planned for the same day as the attack factors into several conspiracy theories, though the 9/11 commission dismisses this as coincidence. After plodding through dozens of hours of recordings, so do I.

Who knows? Coincidences do happen. Could the hijackers have known about the exercise and planned accordingly? Had the US government paid attention to the warnings, might they had cancelled the exercise and been better prepared?

Don't forget the Gaza Strip

While the world's attention is on Lebanon, we should remember also that Israel is also attacking the Gaza Strip.

Radio New Zealand reports that Israel fires about 150 artillery shells into the tiny occupied territory every day, and has killed about 140 people over the last month. Several times per week Israel sends attack helicopters over Gaza. Deliveries of essentials like food have been virtually halted, and the power station has been bombed, leaving people without clean water and electricity.

The Story About Ping

An oldie but a goodie, it's Doc Technical's review of the technical manual The Story About Ping.

Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an insightful and intuitive explanation of one of Unix's most venerable networking utilities. Even more stunning is that they were clearly working with a very early beta of the program, as their book first appeared in 1933, years (decades!) before the operating system and network infrastructure were finalized.

The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat).

The Kingdom of Nouns

A lovely little tale about different stylistic conventions in computer languages, focusing on the Kingdom of Nouns (Java).

In the Kingdom of Javaland, where King Java rules with a silicon fist, people aren't allowed to think the way you and I do. In Javaland, you see, nouns are very important, by order of the King himself. [...]

In Javaland, by King Java's royal decree, Verbs are owned by Nouns. But they're not mere pets; no, Verbs in Javaland perform all the chores and manual labor in the entire kingdom. They are, in effect, the kingdom's slaves, or at very least the serfs and indentured servants. The residents of Javaland are quite content with this situation, and are indeed scarcely aware that things could be any different.

Verbs in Javaland are responsible for all the work, but as they are held in contempt by all, no Verb is ever permitted to wander about freely. If a Verb is to be seen in public at all, it must be escorted at all times by a Noun.

Of course "escort", being a Verb itself, is hardly allowed to run around naked; one must procure a VerbEscorter to facilitate the escorting. But what about "procure" and "facilitate?" As it happens, Facilitators and Procurers are both rather important Nouns whose job is is the chaperonement of the lowly Verbs "facilitate" and "procure", via Facilitation and Procurement, respectively.

Alas, many of the idiots programmers commenting on the post miss the point of the tale, which is not that Java isn't English. Nor is it that Object Oriented design is a bad thing (although, OO is merely one means to a greater end, namely information hiding). The point is that Java's type system forces people to create classes solely for the purpose of carrying functions about, often to an absurdly exaggerated degree.

The question of nouns and verbs (data and functions) is important for programmers, as this article by Joel Spolsky explains.

Shooting the FTA messenger

Ever since the Australian government announced the Free Trade Agreement with the USA, it has made an effort to paint any opposition to it in shades of anti-American bias.

The reality is that Australia's diplomatic corps went to the USA likes Amish into a crack-house: innocent, naive and ripe for victimization. We were convinced (by which I mean our ministers were suffering from a bad case of wishful thinking) that Australia's "special relationship" with the US -- we were one of only a handful of countries that backed the USA's unprovoked invasion of Iraq -- would ensure we got a special deal in the FTA negotiations. The reality was, we got a kick to the guts, and then thanked the US for it.

The Australian government still insists that opposition to the FTA is based on anti-Americanism. It isn't: it is on pro-Australian. The US Congress negotiated hard for the best possible deal for their nation. We went in like simpering innocents, negotiated barely a whit, and made it obvious to the hard-nosed US negotiators that we'd be pathetically grateful for any bones the US might throw our way. Having stuck their reputation on this FTA, the government is in denial of the fact that what we were given with the left hand was taken away five times over with the right.

The head of the Australian National University, Vice-chancellor Professor Ian Chubb, has been quoted as saying that there is an attempt to silence academics who released a study of the FTA which reveals that the results have been harmful to Australia.

The FTA is a commercial agreement between the USA and Australia. If it does more harm than good, if it is a bad deal, then either country can legally withdraw from it. (In fact, one of the reasons it is such a bad deal for Australia is that the US can selectively withdraw from it's promises to us, while forcing us to stick to a "take it or leave it" offer.) But, if the anti-Australia pro-FTA people get their way, by halting research into the economic effect of the FTA, or by selectively ignoring bad news, we (the nation) are doing bad business: instead of working for our own benefit, we work for the benefit of the USA, with no compensating reward.

Why Mel Gibson is wrong

Juan Cole has an excellent article explaining why Mel Gibson's drunken triade against the Jews for starting "every" war is wrong.

I've had my doubts about Mel Gibson, fellow Aussie and talented though he is, since he lost the plot and made a homo-erotic sadomasochistic movie about Jesus Christ. It's a funny old world, isn't it? Draw a picture of Mohammad, and millions of Muslims riot in the street. Make an S&M skin-flick about Jesus that completely ignores Christ's message of love and forgiveness, and millions of Christians make you their hero.

The Anti-Life movement

Guest blogger Jill writes for the Rude Pundit about the so-called "pro-life" movement which is actually anti-life.

She shows the extents to which the "pro-life" movement aims to steal control of women's reproductive systems. It isn't just about abortion: they are attacking the availability of contraception equally as hard -- even for married women, which proves the lie that their opposition to contraception is that it encourages promiscuity. In the "Heart"land, that den of hypocrites and monsters, pharmacists have been known to refuse to fill potentially life-saving prescriptions for antibiotics or vitamins if they came from a reproductive health clinic. Some of these "pro-life" monsters even oppose vaccines against cervical cancer.

She explains how the "pro-life" policies lead to more deaths of mothers, more abortions, more sickness, and that European countries with progressive sex education policies and easy access to contraceptives end up having far fewer abortions than countries like the US and Brazil that ban them. It isn't about saving the poor innocent babies -- the monsters are more than happy to see them die in the womb from infection. It's about making sure that any woman who has sex suffers the consequences: disease, pregnancy, even cancer.

These are very strong claims, and may seem very provocative to those who have heard nothing but specially selected sound-bites from the anti-freedom brigade about "saving the little babies". But Jill's post has many links to direct quotes from, for example, the immoral monster who would rather her daughters die of cervical cancer than face the possibility that she might just grow up to control her own body. See here for the lie that is the "pro-life" movement.

[Update: the link to Feministe (via snipurl) above has changed to here.]

Brother Jed and his Ten Commandments

The Angry Astronomer Jon Voisey has a shameful kink: he loves listening to Fundamentalist preacher Brother Jed Smock give fire and brimstone sermons. In one particular five hour sermon, Brother Jed explicitly listed ten things which will send you on a one-way ticket to Hell.

So, without further ado, here are the Ten Commandments according to Brother Jed Smock:

Thou Shalt Not...

1. ... drink to intoxication


2. ... hug, kiss, or have sex before marriage


3. ... masturbate


4. ... listen to Rock & Roll music


5. ... wear tight pants


6. ... be a lesbian (especially a communist lesbian)


7. ... be a member of a fraternity or a sorority, for lo, it is worse to be in a sorority than to be a whore because at least whores get paid


8. ... get any part of your body pierced besides your ears


9. ... disco dance


10. ... be a designated driver, for this is like driving the bus to Hell

There's a certain... predictability of many of those, but gosh darn it, who knew that stopping your friends from drink-driving was one of the Deadly Sins? I wonder whether there is a special circle of Hell for friends who don't let friends drink and drive, or whether they just get dumped in the same one as disco dancers.

The CBC and DRM

Dr. Michael Geist explains why the CBC is wrong to claim that they have no choice about using Digital Restrictions Management software to lock their streaming music.

Tod Maffin, who runs the blog, defends the CBC's use of DRM, arguing that DRM is required under its commercial music broadcast licenses and that the CBC invites lawsuits if it fails to adequately protect its streams.

While I'm a big fan of CBC's streaming services, the suggestion that CBC must use DRM is plainly wrong. First, there are many other public broadcasters who not only reject DRM, but have adopted open licenses (RadioBras in Brazil makes all of its content available under Creative Commons licenses). Second, there is no legal requirement to use DRM under Canadian law. If certain rights holders demand DRM use, the CBC has an alternative. It can reject those demands and choose instead to use only music that rights holders permit to be broadcast without DRM.

As Dr. Geist goes on to explain, there is no shortage of open music: hundreds of thousands of songs published under Creative Commons licences, and thousands of public domain recordings. In addition, most Canadian independent labels have given DRM a resounding No! As those independents are creating 90% of new Canadian music, the CBC has lots of Canadian content to choose from, instead of sticking with the same old forgettable foreign labels promoting foreign artists.

Hello Kitty Darth Vader

This "Hello Kitty" Darth Vader


is a photoshop job, but this Darth Vera the Sith yenta


is not.

Links to Boing Boing's coverage here and here.

How to steal RFID-equiped cars

Boing Boing reports that cars fitted with RFID-enabled locking systems are (not) surprisingly easy to steal. Thieves can remove a simple fuse and disable the RFID reader, find the spare key, use RFID-enabled blank keys they bought or stole from a dealer, or, most astonishingly of all, use a "semi-secret" sequence of pulls on the hand-brake to bypass the system. (Note: a semi-secret is not a secret.)

The biggest risk is that since insurance companies claim that RFID-keys are infallible, they often refuse to pay out when the car is stolen.

Second biggest on-line music store is DRM-free

Boing Boing is reporting that the world's second-biggest seller of legal on-line music is entirely DRM free.

USA Today is surprised at eMusic's success, given that the major labels refuse to licence their "big hits" to them. That means no Shakira, Beyoncé or U2 -- but plenty of jazz, classical and indie music: Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Credence Clearwater Revival, Miles Davis, Van Morrison, Moby, the White Stripes, Diana Krall, Scott H. Biram, the Pipettes, Dashboard Confessional and Peaches.

No photos please, we're Australian

Melbourne's Southbank shopping centre wants to ban tourists and shoppers from taking photos in the shopping centre -- and even Australia's conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, thinks they're going too far.

But unfortunately there are no laws laying out freedom in privately-owned but public spaces like shopping centres. Because they are privately owned, the centre management is legally permitted to demand virtually any conditions they choose, regardless of whether they are reasonable or not.

The problem (apart from the stupidity of thinking that taking photographs of public buildings is a terrorism threat) is that the law doesn't distinguish between truly private property, like your house and office, and public property that just happens to be privately owned. Once a property owner issues a general invitation for anyone and everyone to enter his property, common sense tells us that the property takes on the characteristics of public property.

The shopping centres want to have their cake and eat it too: they claim that there is no expectation of privacy in the shopping centre because it is a public space, and therefore they can photograph and film visitors, but then turn around and declare that for "privacy reasons" shoppers aren't allowed to take photos. That's just nonsense, but unfortunately it is legally-protected nonsense.

Recently, employees at Flinders Street train station were criticised for abusing Japanese tourists who took photos of the famous Flinders Street clock. The train company defended the practice by playing the terrorism card: what if terrorists took photos of the famous landmark?

Well, what if they did? It's not like the clock is a secret. It's on maps and in books and everything. In any case, these imaginary terrorists could simply walk less than 100 metres down the street to a tourist souvenire shop and buy postcards showing photos of Flinders Street station.

Diebold goes from shonky to shonkier

Inspection of a Diebold voting machine by the Open Voting Foundation has discovered that the machines are even less secure than thought.

Diebold machines have an internal switch which allow the machine to boot a modified operating system. So, using nothing but a screwdriver and a few moments, a crooked operator can take an audited Diebold machine and flip the switch to run hidden, unaudited software.

I find it difficult to credit that this could be incompetence on the part of Diebold's engineers. It seems likely that this is a deliberate feature built into the machine. They have made the testing and certification process irrelevant: no matter how good your tests, you can have no expectation that on the voting day the machine will be running the certified software.

Since Diebold voting machines were used in large numbers, perhaps even the majority, of polling booths in the 2004 and 2000 US Presidential elections, there can be no confidence in the legitimacy of the results.

Don't chalk that pavement!

Melbourne's MX free "news"paper/gossip rag ran a small news story yesterday, Monday 1st August. Er, guys, that would be Tuesday 1st August. Way to go for proof-reading.

Anyway, MX reports that 14 year-olds Kayleigh Mangan and Georgina Smallwood were told by British police to stop playing hopscotch because drawing lines on the pavement with chalk was a crime.

The unnamed community support officers ordered the girls to scrub the markings off the sidewalk to prevent their actions "developing into more serious matters".

A police spokesperson claims they were responding to a complaint about "numerous chalk markings" by a resident of Halesowen.

Remember folks: hopscotch is not a victimless crime. If history teaches us anything, playing hopscotch invariably leads to more serious crimes. If our children are free to play hopscotch on their own street, the terrorists will have won.

Now we know Rush Limbaugh's moral equal

Until civilians -- frankly, I'm not sure how many of them are actually just innocent little civilians running around versus active Hezbo types, particularly the men -- but until those civilians start paying a price for propping up these kinds of regimes, it's not going to end, folks. What do you mean, civilians start paying a price? I just ask you to consult history for the answer to that.
Rush Limbaugh, on the Qana massacre, July 31, 2006

We declared jihad against the US government, because the US government is unjust, criminal and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal ... As for what you asked regarding the American people, they are not exonerated from responsibility, because they chose this government and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and in other places.
Osama bin Laden, on his fatwa against the USA, March 1997

Remember folks, according to Rush Limbaugh, Israel is a democracy, and until the people of Israel stop supporting and voting in governments that commit war crimes and oppress civilians, their enemies are entitled to commit any act, no matter how heinous, against Israeli civilians. They've got nobody to blame but themselves.

So speaks the Islamo-fascist, Rush Limbaugh.

How to win friends for your enemy

Over at The Whiskey Bar, Billmon reminds us that unprovoked attacks against civilians can easily backfire:

The stakes are high for Hizbullah, but it seems it can count on an unprecedented swell of public support that cuts across sectarian lines. According to a poll released by the Beirut Center for Research and Information, 87 percent of Lebanese support Hizbullah's fight with Israel, a rise of 29 percent on a similar poll conducted in February.

More striking, however, is the level of support for Hizbullah's resistance from non-Shiite communities. Eighty percent of Christians polled supported Hizbullah along with 80 percent of Druze and 89 percent of Sunnis.

Lebanese no longer blame Hizbullah for sparking the war by kidnapping the Israeli soldiers, but Israel and the US instead.
[...]
Ghassan Farran, a doctor and head of a local cultural organization, gazes in disbelief at the pile of smoking ruins which was once his home. Minutes earlier, an Israeli jet dropped two guided missiles into the six-story apartment block in the centre of Tyre.

"Look what America gives us, bombs and missiles," says this educated, middle-class professional. "I was never a political person and never with Hizbullah but now after this I am with Hizbullah."

Unless Israel is prepared to take the gloves off and start a full-blown land invasion and genocide in Lebanon -- which I don't believe they have quite reached that state yet, more out of concern for Israeli casualties than for any other reason -- they can't beat Hezbollah by dropping bombs on people's houses, and will only make them stronger.

Like Apollo Creed versus Rocky Balboa, if Israel can't knock Hezbollah out in the first round, the champ loses -- no matter what the final decision on points is. The Israeli right-wing government has handled this badly, underestimating Hezbollah's discipline and fighting ability, underestimating revulsion to war crimes and the slaughter of children, overestimating their ability to commit ethnic cleansing from the air and kill or displace the people of southern Lebanon. Simply by standing up to Israeli tanks and fighters and fighting them to a draw, Israel has lost and Hezbollah has won.

I was going to say "an honourable draw", but with both sides committing war crimes, there is no honour in this war. Still, there is no moral equivalence between the two sides, and not all crimes are equal. Hezbollah's crimes are of carelessness, firing inaccurate missiles into civilian areas where, on occassion, they have killed a civilian: a crime of ommission, failing to take sufficient care. Israel's war crimes are deliberate, crimes of commission: deliberately bombing civilians, guided missiles fired at ambulances, bombing U.N. reports, attacking rescue workers, and so forth.

We should take Israel's claims of self-defence with more than just a grain of salt: since Israel withdraw from their illegal occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, until 12th July of this year, six Israeli civilians died in border violence. Six. Obviously that's six too many, but sane governments don't risk the welfare of their entire nation over one death per year, and moral, ethical people don't slaughter at least 400, mostly innocent civilians including children, and make 800,000+ homeless, over six.