sep 2006 / greg goebel
* Entries include: farming infrastructure, Dawkins' THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, ISS progress, defense contractors and Iraq, RFID insecurity, Athabasca tar sands, Africa progress, robot surgeons, Freedom tower, smart buildings, 911 conspiracies, plastic solar power units, London Ring Of Steel, Moscow spammer, and GI blogs.
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- FOOD & FARMING (9): As described in the last installment, center-pivot irrigation wastes land, but there is a way to cover all the land, using pretty much the same arrangement of pipe segments and A-frames, rolling in a straight line instead of a circle. The difficulty here is that the water source can't be fixed, so a hose connection is used, or the water is pumped out of a ditch.
The "side-roll" irrigator seems to be along the same lines, with pipe segments mounting sprinkler heads, but the A-frames are replaced by large circular spoked wheels, with the pipe running through the center of the wheel. Since the sprinkler heads are fixed to the pipe segments, it would seem hard to understand how the assembly moves along, since the heads would turn over. The answer is that it's not moving, at least not normally. The farmer operates it one place, then shuts it down and uses a little four-wheeled "cart" with a small motor that is fitted to the center of the rig to roll it it farther down the field, to be set up and run from its new position.
One simple approach to field irrigation is to use a big central water cannon. Some are powerful enough to spray hundreds of meters. They can also be mobile, moving across a field on a platform drawn by a cable and winch, with a big water hose trailing behind.
There is a form of irrigation known as "trickle irrigation" that is actually very efficient in its water usage. It involves snaking tubes through the fields, with the tubes fitted with miniature nozzles that are spaced to coincide with the arrangement of crop plants. The scheme, which was invented by the Israelis, puts the water where it's needed, but trickle irrigation is also labor intensive.
* One of the problems with irrigation is "salinization". Irrigation water is never pure, and when it evaporates it leaves behind salts, gradually rendering the soil infertile. That means that some of the water must be allowed to drain off, carrying the salts with it. Salinity problems get worse in arid regions, since there's not a lot of water to spare for drainoff, and at low spots in fields, where the water doesn't drain off easily.
In southern California, drainoff water is accumulated in "evaporation ponds" that are fed by underground pipes from the fields. The water in the ponds evaporates and leaves the salts at the bottom. The ponds reduce productive acreage and there is also the problem of dealing with the residues, but it beats ruining the fields. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: According to a CNET NEWS Online article, Hitachi is now offering a new line of hard disk drives -- for cars. The rugged "EnduraStar" drives can have capacities of up to 50 GB and can tolerate shock or environmental conditions that would wreck a conventional drive. They use fluid dynamic bearings for the motor, not the usual ball bearings. Hitachi has also unveiled a new 6.3 centimeter (2.5 inch) slimline hard disk, the "CinemaStar", with perpendicular recording and a capacity of 160 GB. It is intended for digital camcorders.
* A programmer for Apple Computer named Andrew Carol has come up with one of
the gimmicks of the year. In the 19th century, British researcher Charles
Babbage came up with a series of mechanical computers, including his
"Difference Engines", which were built to crunch through polynomial equations
such as:
f(x) = Ax^2 + Bx + C
Carol was inspired by Babbage's Difference Engine Number 2, which Babbage
designed on paper but wasn't actually built until 1991. Carol decided to
build a new implementation using Lego pieces. Babbage's design was heavily
based on vertical rods; Carol couldn't get that approach to work with Legos,
but he was able to construct equivalent functionality with Lego gears.
The end result is a framework strung with gears and chain drives. Carol would like to go on and implement his own take on Babbage's general-purpose computer, the "Analytical Engine". It might be a big job: Babbage never got his own engine to work.
* The technical press has been making a bit of a fuss about the latest incarnation of the Universal Serial Bus (USB), the connection scheme introduced in 1998 that took a big step forward in making PCs easier to interface with devices. In maturity, most USB devices simply plugged in and ran, using a straightforward cabling scheme. The fact that this was surprising at the time showed how bad things really were.
The original USB spec ran at 12 megabits per second. It was followed in 2002 by "USB 2.0", which runs at 480 megabits per second. Now manufacturers are preparing to introduce a "wireless USB (W-USB)" scheme that even eliminates the cabling. W-USB uses a spread-spectrum wireless communications scheme, also operating at the 480 megabit per second transfer rate. Initially, a W-USB interface will be implemented as a "dongle" that plugs into a standard USB port, with built-in interfaces available on PCs down the road.
There was some political difficulty in establishing the spec. Manufacturers split into two camp: the Intel-led WiMedia Alliance and the Freescale-led UWB Forum. WiMedia is backed by Sony, TI, HP, and Samsung, and it appears that the UWB Forum has faltered, so the current vision is that WiMedia is going to be the winner in W-USB war. WiMedia backers are now preparing to introduce W-USB devices under the "Certified Wireless USB" tradename.
* ISS IN PROGRESS: The history of the International Space Station (ISS) has featured its ups and downs, but as reported in AVIATION WEEK ("Global Crossing" by Frank Morring JR, 21 August 2006), the outpost is now on track for completion.
When the NASA space shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry in 2003, putting work on the ISS on hold, the station had been built up to a preliminary operational capacity, with four pressurized modules -- two American, two Russian -- powered by a single large solar array, with heat dumped into space by a liquid ammonia cooling system. The flight of shuttle Atlantis this September, mission STS-115, restarted construction with installation of a "P3/P4 truss" carrying a second solar array. This was a major component of the station; the payload weighed 15.9 tonnes (17.5 tons) and filled up the shuttle's cargo bay. After installation, it extended its solar panels to a span of 73.2 meters (240 feet).
The shuttle is the only vehicle with the capacity to fly main ISS assemblies, and 15 more shuttle flights are planned over the next four years to bring the station to completion, lifting payloads that will double the size of the station. The interruption in shuttle missions means that all the elements are now at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, being tweaked, checked, and lined up for launch. They include:
The ISS has long been controversial, with critics charging that it provides no value proportional to its cost, but at least the program is not spinning its wheels for the moment, burning up funds and going nowhere. Given its spotty past, everyone will breathe a sigh of relief when the last elements are put in place in 2010 and the aging NASA shuttle fleet is retired.
* BAD FOR BUSINESS: Although it is something of a slogan on the Left that war is good for defense businesses, as reported in THE ECONOMIST ("Collateral Damage", 26 August 2006), the war in Iraq is now having negative effect on some of America's biggest defense contractors.
In the early days of the Bush II Administration's Global War On Terror, there was little limit on defense spending and the revenue of defense contractors grew steadily year to year, with funding provided for the latest high-tech weapon systems. Now the administration is facing fiscal reality and is being forced to make choices.
As long as the US remains in Iraq, the war there will be on top of the priority queue. That would seem to be a nice thing for defense contractors, and it is -- for those who provide services for the military in the combat zone, or supply ammunition and weapons for the fight. The problem is that the US military likes to obtain advanced-technology weapons to make sure that America will be able to keep an edge over an adversary also armed with the latest technology. That's not the kind of adversary being encountered in Iraq. To be sure, advanced technology is being used in the fight, but not in the form of the big-ticket leading-edge weapon systems.
For example, the US Army had put heavy funding into the RAH-66 Comanche armed scout helicopter program, initiated late in the Cold War. The Comanche was a stealthy, computerized high-tech marvel that featured every whizzy feature short of telepathic mind control, but with the end of the Cold War it was overkill. The Army needed useful, cheaper weapons in quantity quickly and killed off the Comanche, more or less replacing it with the "Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter (ARH)" -- a Bell 407 light helicopter, with roots going back to the 1960s, fitted with modern avionics and weaponry. The ARH isn't low-tech by any means, its combat systems being perfectly modern, but it's not a whizzy wonder weapon either. Another effort to develop a stealthy robot helicopter gunship was also axed, with the Army now planning instead to acquire the Firescout, a robot gunship derivative of the long-established Hughes / Schweizer 300 civil helicopter.
The US Air Force has similarly been spending large amounts on the Lockheed Martin F/A-22 Raptor fighter, whose development was also begun late in the Cold War, to counter improved fighters expected to be fielded by the Soviets. The threat it was supposed to counter evaporated, and though the Air Force has so far successfully protected the program as insurance against the emergence of advanced threats in the future, the very expensive Raptor has no particular relevance to the war in Iraq. The big aerial star in the conflict has been the Predator, a piston-powered drone that can carry cameras and a few Hellfire missiles. The Predator isn't low-tech either, with the Air Force now obtaining a turboprop-powered Predator B / Reaper that can carry much more warload -- but nobody would put it in the class of sophistication with the Raptor, and it's far cheaper.
The sign that cutbacks for the big-ticket weapon systems were now going to bite came in August, when Boeing announced the shutdown of its California production line for the C-17 airlifter. The Pentagon had no more orders and export sales had been modest for the big transport aircraft. In the meantime the Army has been working to obtain a light cargolifter, in the form of an off-the-shelf twin turboprop machine, under the Future Cargo Aircraft (FCA) program. The FCA is what the service needs in Iraq to move around without being hit by roadside bombs; the C-17 is nice but not the thing needed on the firing line at present.
The Army, however, is under pressure with the development of the "Future Combat System (FCS)", which is not so much a weapon system as a "system of systems" -- a set of vehicles, weapons, electronics, and software all tied together. The cost of the FCS has doubled since its startup, to about $165 billion USD, and Congress has been taking a critical look at the program. The Army has defended it, issuing a report saying that the prime contractors, Boeing and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), are meeting schedule and doing a good job. The FCS is likely to be refocused to address the counter-insurgency mission, though given the broad nature of the program that might just be a question of putting the right spin on the existing effort and making a few trims to the wind here and there.
Cutting defense programs is always difficult, not merely because the military wants to be prepared for the next conflict -- which as history shows can't be expected to be along the same lines as the previous one -- but because politicians like to protect defense contracts that feed their constituencies. However, given the need to fight a troublesome Mideast war on a limited budget, something's got to give someplace.
* THE BLIND WATCHMAKER (9): It was a relief to finish outlining Richard Dawkins' THE BLIND WATCHMAKER. It was a generally fun and interesting read, but it was also work that cut into time I couldn't spare that easily. The effort certainly did dissipate the sense of irritation that inspired it in the first place -- both by giving me the confidence that comes from thinking things out carefully, and the boredom that comes from spending too much time on a topic.
THE BLIND WATCHMAKER does have one half-exasperating, half-amusing feature, in that Dawkins is something of a stereotypical academic: a sparkling, articulate, clever writer who has done his homework, but sometimes self-superior and willing to sound off emphatically on matters great and small. In a later book, he adds a footnote to denounce the US "right-wing Moral Majority, whose ignorant and single-minded opposition to the teaching of evolution endangers educational standards in several backward North American states."
I find his annoyance understandable, not having much respect for the con games of the Darwin bashers myself -- but where is dry witty British understatement when we need it? Somehow Dawkins reminds me of the saying that the more times you run over a dead cat, the flatter it gets.
I must acknowledge in Dawkins' defense that he can admit that he gets wound up, and he clearly realizes, no doubt from being hit over the head with it repeatedly in the press, that he's not very diplomatic. In one chapter, he gets very hot about a member of a group of taxonomists named "cladists" who argue for legitimate if not unarguable reasons that Darwinism is a distraction to their work -- with this particular member taking the attitude so far as to even publicly declare that Darwinism was "false". All he actually meant was that it was irrelevant to cladistic taxonomy and was being dramatic for shock effect, but of course the Darwin-basher crowd seized on the remark immediately, so thoroughly to Dawkins' totally sympathizable fury that he ended the discussion by saying: "Now I need to go out and dig in the garden, or something."
Dawkins is an outspoken, even dogged, atheist who publicly denounces religion as superstition, and has gone so far as to pin all the world's evils on religion. The whole target of THE BLIND WATCHMAKER was to deny the hand of God in Creation by showing that nature does not follow any specific design. I could just as easily reply that the entire scheme of nature shows a certain high-level order or "meta-order", defining an elegant system that spontaneously generates vast diversity, and so actually does demonstrate the hand of God. As someone once said to me: "Evolution is the way things work -- God planned it that way." What a relief to hear somebody say that.
Dawkins did mention in a later book that a Roman Catholic scientist, Kenneth Miller of Brown University, has made much the same point, and Dawkins did make an effort to respect his opinion. Miller, incidentally, is a prominent activist for the Darwin cause in the confrontation with ID.
In fact, one could argue that since the Creator is all-knowing and all-powerful, then He knows and controls all the chance events in the Universe for all time. That means that every stage in the evolution of life is exactly known and directed personally by Him. However, this is a bit of sheer sophistry worthy of a medieval theologian and in practice only amounts to a wiseguy exercise that would have amused the late Douglas Adams.
Dawkins' confrontational atheism is counterproductive; it ends up coming across as intolerant and stressed out, as well as about as constructive as shooting peas at a elephant. Much worse, it helps emotionalize the Darwin issue and so plays into the hands of the Darwin bashers. On a scientific basis they haven't a chance of pushing their argument through the US courts, and so they attempt to stir up controversy instead. The reality is that the sciences have nothing more or less directly to do with religion than does, say, baseball, and no more reason for a feud. When Dawkins attacks religion, he gives the perception that science is opposed to religion, creating a pointless conflict when science is just as neutral on the issue of God as is baseball.
There was an episode of THE SIMPSONS that involved Lisa Simpson finding a fossil angel in the garage. Of course this led to a loud controversy, with Steven Jay Gould making an appearance. The end result was that the courts issued an order that required science and religion to keep 500 feet away from each other at all times. Seems like a good solution to me. [END OF SERIES]
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- FOOD & FARMING (8): Irrigation is regarded as one of the foundations of civilization, allowing cities and nations to stay fed in the face of inconstant nature. Increased agricultural productivity meant that such societies could support city dwellers who didn't raise food themselves, allowing specialization of services, and developing extensive irrigation systems also implied a level of civic organization to plan out the systems and build them.
The oldest irrigation scheme is the "canal and ditch" approach, with water diverted into a canal and then into branching ditches in the fields. It's considerable planning and work to set up such a system, with the canals and ditches dug to the right hydraulic grade and the fields carefully levelled to make sure the water is evenly distributed. The task is complicated, and in many locales it is controlled by a district irrigation board, which occupies a middle ground between private concern, public utility, and elected governmental apparatus.
In the US, farmers are allocated water by the irrigation board in terms of "acre-feet", meaning they get that many feet of water for each acre on their land, the water being parceled out over the growing season. Water distribution is controlled by gates and weirs, with some used to balance the water flow through the network, and others --"headgates" or "delivery gates" -- used to dump water into the fields. The gates are activated according to a preplanned schedule.
The main alternative to canal and ditch irrigation is sprinkler irrigation. Sprinkler systems tend to lose more water by evaporation, but they are easier to maintain and can work on uneven ground. While some agricultural sprinkler systems aren't much different in concept from those that might be used for maintaining lawns, out here in the West and the Great Plains the predominant approach is the "center pivot" sprinkler system.
I recall flying back to Colorado on a jetliner with a family from Massachusetts, with the parents behind me and myself chatting pleasantly with their two cute little girls on the seats next to me. They were all very puzzled by the way the fields were laid out, organized as squares with the crops growing in big circles inside them.
I explained the center-pivot system to them, though I got it a bit wrong. The facts are that the scheme was invented in the 1950s by a farmer from eastern Colorado named Frank Zybach. It involves a long string of pipe segments, with an A-frame mounting two wheels at each joint of the segments and spray sprinklers hung from the pipes. They often have an oscillating sprinkler head -- the kind often seen in public parks, spraying back and forth over an arc -- at the end to extend the sprayer's reach.
The sprinkler rig is connected to a fixed pivot at the center that feeds it water as it slowly circles around the field. This was where I dropped the ball in my explanation, thinking that there was a little "pony motor" on the end that moved the thing around. This was a DUH in hindsight, since the rig is too flexible to be moved around in such a way; it would buckle up immediately. The reality is much more interesting.
Each A-frame is actually powered. This immediately leads to the other problem of how to synchronize the motors, since the A-frame on the end will have to move much faster than the A-frame in the center. It was Frank Zybach's genius to make the problem go away. The outermost A-frame is set to the desired operating speed, and it then moves around the circle at its slow pace. None of the other A-frames move at all -- until the joint between the outer segment and the next segment inward reaches a certain deflection, activating a switch that turns on the inner A-frame. This segment rolls until it activates the A-frame on the next inward segment, and so on.
The center-pivot rig doesn't move in nice neat lockstep fashion, but it doesn't have to. The rig can cover a complete circle in as little as half a day, but it usually performs a rotation once every three or four days. It moves so slowly that the rig never seems to be moving at all. The motors running the A-frames don't have to be very big, since they are heavily geared down.
Since the rig moves faster at the end than in the center, if water were dispersed evenly along its length, the field at the end would end up dry and the field at the center would end up waterlogged; in addition, water pressure drops over the length of the line. The trick is to put fewer and smaller sprinkler heads closer to the center. It's a bit hard to observe the spacing since the rig is so long, but if you're driving down a hill and have a view of a rig operating in a field below, the progressively increasing density of the spray pattern is apparent.
Center-pivot irrigation means that the field can be left clear of fixed or semi-fixed irrigation pipes that would be an obstacle to farm machinery. The center-pivot rig does establish a round peg in a square hole, wasting about 20% of the land, but it's usually marginal land that wouldn't be worth too much without irrigation and so the loss is tolerable. Center-pivot irrigation is now used in other dry climates elsewhere, and in places where land allocation hasn't resulted in a tidy rectilinear grid, a hexagonal grid is used instead, cutting the lost land down to 10%. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* HACKING RFID: As radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems become more widespread, they are encountering obstacles, such as privacy advocates who find them intrusive and even an overenthusiastic writer who claims they are a sign of the Apocalypse. According to a WIRED Online article from May 2006 ("The RFID Hacking Underground" by Annalee Newitz), they are also now confronting hackers.
RFID cards are often used as keys to get into offices and other moderately secure areas. In a demonstration witnessed by the WIRED reporter, a hacker named Jonathan Westhues showed that, armed with a portable RFID interrogator, he could simply walk up to an employee carrying such a key card and read all its information, allowing him to program his own key card and obtain access.
Along with key cards, RFID technology and its relatives are used to unlock and start cars; track inventory and pharmaceuticals; in automated traffic toll systems such as "FasTrak" and "E-ZPass"; buy gasoline with systems such as "SpeedPass"; track livestock; and (soon) as components of passports and credit cards. Doctors are even talking about implantable RFID chips for patients. The market for RFID technology is expected to increase by an order of magnitude in ten years.
RFID technology traces its conceptual roots back to the "identification friend or foe (IFF)" systems developed during World War II. RFID technology as we know it was first developed in the 1960s and first used to control access to government secured installations in the 1970s. Commercial applications started up in the 1980s, and began to expand rapidly in the last decade or so as prices have fallen.
Most RFID tags are passive: they have a digital chip linked to an antenna, with a tag reader flooding the antenna with radio energy to power up the chip, and then read back its contents. The scheme is short range, operating at about arm's length. RFID data can be encrypted -- the passport RFID schemes specify coding -- but that increases costs by a factor of twenty, and so most RFID systems are an open book to anyone who wants to read them. Since many RFID chips are rewriteable, they can also in principle be rewritten by anyone who wants to do so. Rewriteable RFID chips are lockable, but in practice RFID system users like the flexibility of changing tag data at will. Unfortunately, that proves in principle convenient for hackers as well.
RFID is now roughly in the same position as the Internet was early on. Nobody worried about security much in those days, and now the Internet has become something like a bad neighborhood. Although most of the people cracking RFID at this time are simply performing demonstrations in an effort to improve security, RFID has the chance of becoming a bad neighborhood as well.
* In another example, the author of the article met a computer science grad student from the University of California at Berkeley named David Molnar. His specialty is RFID systems, and he used as his target the RFID systems used in library books. This scheme involves RFID tags glued to the inside covers of books that store book serial numbers and loan status. Checking out a book involves simply setting it on a metal plate and pushing a button. Walking around the library, he explained that he could go through the shelves with a reader-writer system and wipe or modify the RFID tags. If he took books home, he could do the same in privacy. None of the tags were locked.
Libraries have had problems with theft predating the RFID age. The threat of theft to commercial establishments is as bad or worse. The Future Store in Rheinberg, Germany, is a showcase for the RFID-enabled "supermarket of the future", where businesses can test out RFID technologies and applications. All the items on the shelves have RFID pricetags that can be easily updated when prices change. The tags can be interrogated to check inventory or for easy checkout.
A German security expert named Lukas Grunwald has demonstrated how he could cruise the aisles of the Future Store and change product RFID tags at will, copying the tag of a bottle of cheap wine and then "pasting" it into the RFID tag of the high-priced stuff. Of course, the tags were unlocked -- after all, the store is experimental. Future Store officials say that one of the reasons the experiment is being conducted is to investigate such security issues.
Grunwald has been clever in considering some of the security threats to RFID. He has pointed out that automated-toll systems could be used to spy on people, for example marking an E-ZPass car system and then logging which toll booths the car passed through, and when.
The ExxonMobil SpeedPass system for purchasing gasoline has also been cracked, by a group of computer scientists from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who managed to pump gas for free. SpeedPass does use an encrypted system, but the encryption wasn't very tough and it took about a half hour of dedicated work to crack it. The RFID chips were made by Texas Instruments; they are also used in RFID-enabled automobile keys that prevent a car from being started if an RFID interrogation fails. Once the RFID protection is cracked, however, it's easy to hotwire the car.
Of course, the Johns Hopkins team has been recommending tougher cryptosystems to block such unwanted entry. The new US passport system based on RFID technology not only has high-grade encryption, it can't even be read unless the passport is open, ensuring that a hacker simply walking around a crowded airport with a reader can't steal the IDs of those he passes by. However, the researchers say it can still be cracked.
As a parting shot, the author allowed herself to be implanted with an RFID tag system about the size of a grain of rice, built by VeriChip and approved by the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA). She then went back to Jonathan Westhues, who promptly scanned it himself. When she heard that the boss of VeriChip had stated that the company's product was "just like a key card", she dryly commented: "Indeed".
* ATHABASCA DIRTY BLACK GOLD: An article from WIRED magazine a little while back ("The Trillion-Barrel Tar Pit" by Brendan I. Koerner, July 2004) reported on a visit to the tar pits of Athabasca in the province of Alberta, Canada, with known deposits of 300 billion barrels of oil, and possible access to a trillion more.
There's a trick to it, however, in that it's all in the form of tar mixed with sand and buried well underground, a material referred to with a degree of understatement as "heavy oil". It's not a new discovery, local native tribes long used it to caulk their canoes, but in an era of cheap oil nobody had much more use for it than that. The era of cheap oil is over, and evolution of production technology now makes heavy oil a bargain. Oil firms have been commercially extracting oil from the Athabasca tar sands for some time now, and with the promise of massive profits production is now ramping up aggressively.
A process for extracting the oil from the tar sands was developed by a University of Alberta chemist named Karl Clark in the 1920s, who proposed using steam to perform the separation. However, in a demonstration that there is a big difference between a lab experiment and a commercial process, it took decades to get things to work, and still longer to actually make money. A group of energy companies working together as "Syncrude" initially began to try to exploit the Athabasca tar sands in the late 1970s, during the first oil crisis, only to start losing money hand over fist when oil prices fell in the 1980s. Syncrude cut staff aggressively but didn't give up, working to improve efficiency so that the operation would be profitable even at low oil prices.
Originally, the digging was perform much like coal strip mining, using huge "draglines" to get at the tar sands. A dragline is a huge machine, like a small hotel on two huge long feet that can scoot itself backward, while throwing out a huge bucket on a long boom and dragging it back to scoop up the earth. The material is then hauled off on conveyor belts for processing.
This works fine for coal but didn't work well for tar sands, and the draglines did not like Alberta's harsh winters at all. Syncrude got rid of the draglines, replacing them with oversized power shovels and huge dump trucks. The trucks dump their loads into a crusher, which pulverizes the material. It is then mixed with hot water and put through a "cyclofeeder" that uses centrifugal action to extract the oil-rich component, known as "bitumen". The bitumen is cooked in "cokers" to get rid of sulfur and other impurities. The coker output is crude oil, which can be processed in conventional oil refineries.
The entire operation is as automated as Syncrude researchers can make it, with components of the process linked by fiber optic cables, a dispatching system keeping the big dump trucks moving efficiently, and careful monitoring of the equipment to make sure it is all working right. Syncrude officials think they can reduce costs further.
The trillion additional barrels of fuel mentioned above are trapped too deep to make surface mining sensible. It is possible to inject steam through boreholes into the deposits to force the heavy oil upward, but this is an energy-intensive process. A more experimental process uses gaseous hydrocarbons to get at the deep tar deposits, and there have been some experiments with air injection processes. With a world hungry for oil, there's plenty of motive to keep on hunting for a way to get at all that buried energy.
* A BBC WORLD NEWS video report reported on a similar scenario in the US state of Montana, with Beeb reporter Matt Frei visiting the state governor and getting a flight in a Beech Super King Air over the huge strip mines of this big and empty state. The governor was pushing "coal to oil", promising that Montana could supply fuel to the US for 40 years at $30 USD a barrel. That sounded a bit like an exaggeration, but even twice that price would be competitive these days. Environmentalists, not surprisingly, are not exactly thrilled with the idea.
Incidentally, Mr. Frei, who tend towards the snarky in his reporting style -- admittedly he's not in a league with his BBC colleague, the infamous Jeremy Paxman, who can come across as simply rabid -- seems to enjoy his trips out to Big Sky country. I sense he fancies being the British cowboy out on the range. I wonder if he's bought cowboy boots yet.
* UPBEAT AFRICA? Africa sometimes seems like the world's basket case, but according to THE ECONOMIST ("Africa's Economy: A Glimmer Of Light At Last?", 24 June 2006), things do seem to be looking up, at least a bit.
Take the city of Luanda, the capitol of Angola. Angola was once one of the worst-off African nations, plagued by civil war and bad governance, but now roads are being built and buildings are sprouting up all over the city. Angola's economy grew by 15.5% in 2005. This was the highest growth recorded in Subsaharan Africa, but overall the region's economies grew by 5% in 2005.
Except for South Africa, Subsaharan Afica has few technical export industries of note, but it has oil, minerals, and food, and the accelerating engine of international commerce wants to buy them. China's prime minister, Weng Jiabao, was recently on a tour of seven African countries, lining up trade deals in which Africa will provide China with raw materials and foodstuffs. Oil and metal prices are up, increasing profits, and even agricultural economies such as Ethiopia and Uganda are doing well in foreign trade these days. Rich countries have been more generous with aid, and also have forgiven $35 billion USD in debt.
However, it is local action that has made most of the difference. Some countries, such as Cote d'Ivoire, Somalia, and most notoriously Zimbabwe, remain basket cases, but over much of the rest of Subsaharan Africa governments have been getting inflation under control, and the level of warfare is clearly on the decline. Angola, Sierra Leone, and Liberia now seem relatively peaceful after long civil wars, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, though in terrible shape, has now held elections. Given the good news, foreign investment in the continent is on the increase -- a total of $18 billion USD in 2004, three times the yearly level of the 1990s.
The good news is limited, however. Africa has had its upward blips before, crashing when world commodity prices fell; foreign investment and aid, due to a history of disappointments, tends to be fickle. Aside from South Africa, the 48 countries of Subsaharan Africa have poor infrastructure and little serious industry. Those countries where growth has been rapid still have populations that remain mostly poor, with the percentage of the population below the poverty line remaining stubbornly fixed even as it falls in Asia and Latin America.
The worst problem remains a failure of leadership, with the continent still tending towards governments run by "Big Men" whose only real skill is corruption. Some governments, like that of Nigeria, are trying to deal with the corruption, but the world image of the region remains negative. Progress towards development goals, even in relatively well-run countries like Botswana, has been slow. Real economic and social progress in Africa seems dependent on the predominance of representative governments that are held accountable for their actions, who can help educate their citizens, improve their health, build useful infrastructure and social institutions, and encourage commerce. It's a long road up.
* A follow-on article ("Black Star Tries To Rise, Again") in the same issue gives an example of Subsaharan Africa's history of woes by reporting on Ghana's plans for celebrations of its 50th year of independence in 2007. There will be a speech by Nelson Mandela, military parades, and a goodwill football match between Ghana and the West African country's former colonial master, Britain.
The celebration brings out mixed memories of the past half-century, however. It all started out gloriously, with the charismatic leader of the new nation, Kwame Nkrumah, instituting grand development plans to liberate Ghana from its era of colonial oppression. Nkrumah became a radical darling in the West, being greeted with honors at John F. Kennedy's white house, and providing inspiration for American civil rights leaders.
Then it all went hideously wrong in a way that would become only too familiar over the continent. The overblown development programs ended up busts, while Nkrumah became less concerned about progress and more concerned about staying in power. He became a Big Man in charge of a corrupt authoritarian government, to be finally overthrown by a military coup in 1966. There followed decades of unstable government featuring the occasional coup, and by the end of the century, GDP was only at the level it had been in the mid-1960s. At independence, Ghana was one of Subsaharan Africa's richest nations, but the country had been run economically into the ground.
Ghanans still feel like celebrating, however. Economic growth is to the right and up, and in the 1990s the country acquired a workable representative government with freedom of expression after Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings took over in a coup -- and then, remarkably, passed authority off to civilian control. Corruption and poverty remain, with Ghana remaining weak, but it appears that Ghanans have finally seen through the con games of Big Men. One Ghanan official says that the country is likely to keep on doing better with the current "democratic dispensation rather than the short-term injections of messiahs."
* THE BLIND WATCHMAKER (8): Richard Dawkins completes his argument in THE BLIND WATCHMAKER by examining the scientific alternatives to Darwinism. Of course, the leading alternative is, or at least was, Lamarckism, postulated over two centuries ago by the Chevalier de Lamarck. The idea was simple, based on the notion of "inheritance of acquired characteristics". The classic example was that of a giraffe: proto-giraffes stretched their necks to feed on higher branches of trees, passing their stretched neck on down to progeny, who stretched more, and so on until the modern giraffe came to be.
Now we know that the genome doesn't absorb such lessons from its current embodiment and then pass them down to its next embodiment. However, Lamarckism tends to persist in various ways. During Josef Stalin's reign over the USSR, a quack biologist named Trofim Davidovich Lysenko managed to get his ear.
Traditional Communism was not enthusiastic about the theory. As has been said in a different context, Marxists prefer their theories to be deterministic, and natural selection is not. Lysenko's enemies were sent off to prison, sometimes executed, and it is generally said that he set back Soviet biology for an entire generation. Dawkins commented kindly on a Marxist colleague who asked if Lamarckism was clearly wrong. Dawkins replied that it was, and his colleague sadly accepted this, but added that it was a pity that it wasn't, since it held out hope for the perfectability of humankind.
Incidentally, modern conservatives tend to accuse Darwinism of being a doctrine of the Left, a notion justified to an extent by the way the Left comes out of the woodwork when the Right attacks Darwin. However, the Left has no particular attachment to the sciences -- after all, the Right hasn't been leading the charge against genetic modification of crop plants -- and would fight as hard if the Right attacked, say, baseball. Darwinism is not inherently a political theory. It has been cited by political movements of both the Right and Left, but only as an act of mercenary convenience.
There was also another rival theory that had some popularity early in the 20th century called "mutationism" that proposed new species arose by directed mutation, that species change moved in dramatically particular directions and natural selection had little or nothing to do with it. The concept followed an earlier notion called "saltationism" that suggested species arose abruptly -- that is, that an animal of one species would give birth to a related but different species. Such ideas are dead now, lingering only in comic books, where mutants with superhuman powers arise by, say, exposure to gamma rays.
* In fact, the only alternatives to evolution by natural selection being pushed in a significant way in the modern era are "biblical creationism (BC)" and "intelligent design (ID)". BC is flatly not a scientific theory, instead being based in conservative religious ideology, claiming that the biblical Book of Genesis should be regarded as equivalent to a science text. That in itself wouldn't be a problem if biblical creationists simply said they didn't want to buy off on Darwin and go their own way, but they actively attack Darwinism.
BC literature is a transparent pretense at being scientific -- often under the cover of "creation science" -- by people who don't disguise their contempt for the sciences, reading something like a book on theology written by a militant atheist. When biblical creationists then insist that their proofs be refuted, the sensible realize perfectly well this is a con game. Trying to convince people even that 2 + 2 = 4 when they are single-mindedly determined to deny it is simply providing a convenient target for every brick they can pull out of their fanny packs to throw.
It is exactly the same game as played by conspiracy theorists, who know perfectly well that it is far easier to fabricate arguments than to refute them. They will respond to every refutation with new fabricated arguments and blandly assume that they are still credible after being shot full of holes the first time around. There are books full of refutations of BC for those interested, but it's hard to think of who might be. Nobody who has any real interest in the sciences finds BC literature credible for a second, and anybody who would take BC literature seriously doesn't have a second's sympathy for the sciences.
* ID is at least often driven by religious ideology, and certainly those who advocate it can end up becoming nothing more than biblical creationists wearing a fake nose with glasses and moustache -- playing the same games and easily degenerating into the same rhetoric. However, in principle ID is asking a serious question, a perfectly legitimate one that an honest person could ask, one which Dawkins wrote THE BLIND WATCHMAKER to answer: how could an undirected process like natural selection account for such biological elaboration and diversity? Dawkins indeed makes a good case for his views, but it's by no means an open-and-shut one, particularly with regards to the origins of life itself. That leaves welcome space for alternate scientific theories.
The crippling flaw of ID is that while it raises a legitimate question, it gives a bogus answer, or rather no answer at all. It does not propose any mechanism for how things actually came about, instead simply proclaiming that there is no mechanism, inserting into the "equations" a term that says: AND THEN A MIRACLE HAPPENS.
This might actually be true -- but just as much could be said for the idea that, say, the entire Universe was created yesterday and that all our memories and records of the past are fabrications. There's no way to refute the notion, but there's no way to prove it either, and all it amounts to is useless excess baggage, an element of fantasy stories where variations on the concept occasionally pop up, or as a means of simply being annoying. That's the problem with invoking the supernatural: there's no constraint on the answer, so any answer can be invented as desired.
ID has been sarcastically but not inaccurately called the "full-blown intellectual surrender strategy", one particularly caustic critic going farther and describing it as explaining lightning by attributing it to thunderbolts thrown by Zeus. Like it or not, the sciences are by definition materialistic, seeking the nuts and bolts of how things work: that's the point of the exercise. Some ID advocates absolutely do not like the idea, but once they take that position they are not merely rejecting Darwinism but are rejecting the sciences in their entirety.
The sciences, though undeniably not perfect -- nothing in the real world is -- have plenty of successes to back them up, and can have some confidence in the materialistic approach from the fact that nobody's ever observed in a provable way a literally supernatural event actually happening. We can't prove that Santa Claus will never come down the chimney on Christmas Eve, but we can say confidently that we haven't caught him doing it yet. Nobody can say as an absolute fact that miracles, magic, or psi powers don't exist, but nobody, not even ID advocates, realistically makes any practical plans dependent on them. While a prosperous, devout farmer may pray for a good harvest, he's going to rely on the cold hard facts of agricultural science to plant his fields.
This implies no condemnation of religious beliefs that assert the occurrence of miracles. It's just that the sciences can say nothing about the matter, since by definition they deal with the natural, not the super-natural. The sciences might point out that miracles defy the laws of physics, but that would be redundant. Of course they defy the laws of physics. They wouldn't be miracles if they didn't.
However, this agnosticism cuts both way, since citing the miraculous rarely impresses a skeptic. A skeptic could even admit to the possibility of a miracle, but attribute it to the work of superpowerful aliens with advanced technology instead of supernatural causation, and in the absence of any supporting evidence defy anyone to prove differently. The idea that nature violates its own rules is unacceptable to those who are grounded in the sciences, amounting to a postulate of a "God of cheap tricks", as Dawkins puts it. They will never believe it unless the evidence is unarguable by an overwhelming standard, and in the case of ID the only people who think it so are the ID advocates.
It is still hard to not sympathize a bit with ID advocates. Compared to BC advocates, they've conceded most of the ground to the Darwin advocates, who stubbornly refuse to concede an inch to ID in return. However, as far as Darwin advocates are concerned, given the evidence the ID faction had no choice but to concede if they wanted to retain a shred of credibility, and the Darwin advocates see the claims of ID as pointless dead weight.
ID promoters sometimes insist that the failure of Darwin advocates to recognize the inherently miraculous nature of the origins of species is an "act of denial". The reality is that, to advocates for the sciences, the notion that unexplained phenomena demand the invocation of supernatural events is not merely unbelievable but downright silly. After all, much of what we know with high confidence now was a complete mystery at some time in the past. Life processes themselves were once regarded as miraculous, but nowdays everyone knows that they are biochemistry, no more and no less, and nobody makes much of a fuss about it one way or another.
Imagine going back to the middle of the last century to listen to James Watson and Francis Crick working on the mystery of the genome: "Francis, this whole genome business is just too hard to explain by any physical means. We obviously don't really know the principles of how it works, and critics have mocked all the theories put forth so far as completely unbelievable and laughable. I think we just ought to just concede that there's no way we'll ever understand it."
"Jimmy my boy, you're completely right. Obviously some supernatural process has to be involved. We'll have to give up on our double-helix speculations and devise a theory named Intelligent Genomics to put the whole thing to bed."
It is also understandable that ID advocates find the notion of undirected evolution by natural selection unsettling. As Albert Einstein famously said in another context: "God does not play dice with the Universe." However, as Einstein's colleague Neils Bohr replied: "Stop telling God what to do."
Darwin advocates can respond to ID advocates that it seems as least as hard to swallow that all the features accounted for by Darwin's theory -- the lopsided halibut, the useless rear leg bones in the tails of whales, tree kangaroos, the genomes of mitochondria, the succession of life forms in the fossil record, the patterns of distributions of families of animals, and the well-ordered DNA "tree of life" -- have no underlying rationale, that all the clues are noise, just false leads left by a prankish Creator. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- FOOD & FARMING (7): Beef is nice but people also like pork and chicken, and raising pig and chickens are big businesses. While cattle are usually owned by a rancher and sold to meat packers, pigs and chickens are usually raised directly by meat packers.
Hogs are generally raised indoors in a long, low-roofed shed, with a slotted floor over a waste pit. The shed is organized into pens with 8 to 10 pigs each, the number in a pen being limited by the fact that if more pigs were in a pen, the weaker pigs would be crowded out by the others and would starve. Feed is dumped from overhead bins into a feeding trough simultaneously to make reduce jostling for the food. The bins are refilled immediately after being dumped, since if it were done just before the bins were dumped, the pigs would go into a frenzy.
Chickens are raised in externally similar sheds, with the hens in cages hung from the ceiling so that the floor can be hosed off easily. There may be two or three tiers of cages, staggered from each other so chickens on one level don't foul the cages of the chickens below.
Chickens don't like getting too hot, so the shed is well ventilated with big fans, and a misting system like that used to keep produce fresh in the supermarket is often used as well. There are no windows in the shed; hens normally only lay in the spring and summer, but if the lights are on 14 hours a day, they lay all year long.
All animal husbandry generates manure, with pigs and chickens being among the worst offenders in terms of odor. Neighbors complain about being downwind on a hot day, and getting rid of the manure is troublesome. In our energy-limited times, farmers are increasingly making use of manure digester plants that use manure to produce methane for heating and power generation. Nobody thinks biogas production is a road to energy independence, but it's a cost-effective source of energy for the farms, obtaining value from what otherwise would just be an overhead.
* Of course, many other animals are raised on the farm. Turkey farming is another big business, with turkey meat eaten not merely on its own merits, but also as filling for hot dogs and even as lean synthetic ham. Sheep are raised mostly for wool, mutton not being all that popular these days.
Horses are raised for riding and pack animals, with mules raised on a much smaller extent for pack use. Here in the mountain states, llamas are bred on a very small scale as well, since they make excellent pack animals for the high terrain. Buffalo -- "bison" to purists -- are also raised in the region on a modest scale for meat. The idea of trying to milk a buffalo cow is something out of a Wild West tall tale, the beasts not being noted in the slightest for their docility. Some of the ranches sell buffalo hunting rights.
Fish farming has long been popular in the Far East, with carp raised in local ponds and fed with food scraps. It is beginning to catch on in a big way in the West. Oceanic fishing is said to the last major domain of the human hunter-gathering, and the future is increasingly belonging to the fish farmer.
Work is being done on genetically engineered fish that mature faster. There has also been research in general into genetically modifying animals to produce pharmaceutical proteins, in effect turning them into drug factories. Genetically modified goats have been developed, and work has been done on chickens that lay drug-filled eggs. Similar exercises have been performed with tobacco plants, but though the economic return on using farms as drug factories is potentially huge, the whole concept of using GM organisms to produce drugs remains completely experimental for the time being. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* ROBOT SURGERY REVISITED: An article in US NEWS & WORLD REPORT ("A Guiding Hand" by Michelle Andrews, 31 July 2006) revisits robot surgery, previously discussed in these pages in December 2005. The idea is an extension of laparascopic surgery, in which operations are performed on patients through small incisions using various types of extension tools. Robot surgery replaces the hand-held tools with a remote-controlled robot system, operated by a surgeon using stereo video glasses.
Robot surgery was originally developed for military use, the vision being that surgeons would be able to perform operations on the front lines while working in safety, even half a world away. "Telesurgery" as such remains experimental, but robotic surgery has become very popular for prostate gland removal. Solid evidence shows that robotic prostatectomies are much more effective than other methods, with a lower rate of side effects and quicker patient recovery. However, although the robots are potentially useful for general surgery, evidence hasn't accumulated yet that they work better for other operations than traditional methods.
Heart surgery has proven a difficult target, and a robot is clearly overkill for operations such as repairing hernias, and removing gallbladders, appendixes, or ovaries under relatively benign circumstances. Traditional laparascopy does the job just fine and is much more cost-effective.
Hospitals are still shelling out $1.5 million USD a pop for the da Vinci Surgical System, the only surgical robot being sold in the USA for the moment. They're willing to pay the price despite the fact that robotic surgery remains largely unproven in general use. That's because surgeons like to be on the cutting edge, so to speak, and many feel robotic surgery will be vindicated as the way of the future. There's also the appeal to customers, some cynics flatly labeling the robots "marketing tools". In fact, for the time being robotic surgery is the most expensive surgical option and some insurers are leery of approving it.
Hospitals that obtain the robots for prostatectomies do get a lot of mileage out of them, though patients should be forewarned that, to no surprise, it takes a fair number of operations before a surgeon masters the technology, with the first 30 patients taking their chances and the surgeon not really flying with full confidence until after performing several hundred operations.
Despite the difficulties, robotic surgery clearly has a big future. Work is now underway to give the machines "tactile feedback", the current technology not providing any "feel" to the surgeon. Another technology under investigation is "data fusion", with ultrasound or other medical imaging data merged into the surgeon's video system. Finally, work is being done on specialized robots that would only be able to perform a limited range of operations, but which would be much less expensive and easier to use than a full-function general-purpose robot.
* PHOENIX RISING: The five-year memorial on the 11 September attacks on the USA has brought attention to the "Freedom Tower", the new skyscraper that will be the centerpiece of the complex of buildings on the site where once the twin World Trade Center (WTC) towers stood. According to a BBC WORLD Online article ("Building A Skyscraper After 9/11" by Rebecca Morelle), the Freedom Tower will rise to 541 meters (a patriotic 1,776 feet) and is to be completed in 2011. To no surprise it will feature innovations designed to improve safety and survivability:
There will also be a dedicated pressurized staircase in the core for emergency services, wide enough to allow fire and rescue workers to carry gear up.
The Freedom Tower was designed by the firm of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill (SOM). It will feature a parapet at 418 meters (1,368 feet) to mark the height of old Trade Center towers. SOM officials believe the structure is state-of-the-art in terms of the safety of its design, but do not claim it is foolproof. A company official says: "We have learned to deal with threats on buildings, but architecture should be the last line of defense."
* SMART BUILDINGS: We tend to take buildings and other structures for granted as a technology, but some researchers are considering an eye-opening technological leap forward. An article from WIRED NEWS Online ("Smart Buildings Make Smooth Moves" by Lakshmi Sanda) discussed the idea of "responsive structures" that can sense their internal or external environment and adapt accordingly -- compensating for changes in temperature and sunlight, adjusting to winds, modifying themselves to handle crowds.
One researcher working on the concept, Tristan d'Estee Sterk of the Office For Robotic Architectural Media & Bureau For Responsive architecture, is working on shape-changing "building envelopes" using "actuated tensegrity" structures, consisting of a system of rods and wires manipulated by pneumatic "muscles" forming the framework of its walls. The framework is controlled by embedded computing intelligence, resulting in light, strong, adaptable, and efficient structures. Imagine a high-rise that can brace itself against winds, or an earthquake, or a home that will shake the snow off the roof.
As Sterk points out, architects have always known that a building's shape impacts how it is lit, cooled, and heated. He believes that advanced technology allows architects to advance to a higher level, saying that buildings "clad in new generations of energy-making materials could alter their form to track the sun, enable greater shading or sunlight penetration while also producing energy." He adds that such a building "could even eliminate the need for air conditioning by using shape to improve ventilation rates."
Sterk is now designing a set of ultralightweight skyscrapers for Chicago, which is often referred to as the "Windy City" and so provides a challenge to high-rise design. Sterk's concepts use actuated tensegrity to let wind blow through, with the buildings shifting gently to adapt to wind conditions.
This is the sort of blue-sky idea which immediately confronts designers with a long list of problems, and advocates of responsive structures realize they have a lot of proving to do. There is also the problem of persuading people to live in buildings that don't necessarily sit still.
Giancarlo Magnoli, a researcher at the Kinetic Design Group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thinks that future buildings may require a different mindset, being conceptually more like modern cars, with their integrated climate-control and safety systems. Says Magnoli: "Sophisticated [automotive] systems don't allow any misuse of brakes, wheels or fuel, and air bags instantly appear to protect us in case of extreme events. Our house rarely does all of this for us -- but we believe it could."
* RE-CALL 911: The unhappy anniversary of the 11 September terrorist attacks on the US has arrived, accompanied by a flood of conspiracy theories. According to an article in THE WASHINGTON POST ("9/11 Theorists Multiply" by Michael Powell), 36% of Americans think that the US government had passive or even active complicity in the attack. 12% think the towers were hit by cruise missiles.
Welcome to the world of conspiracy paranoia, where reality wavers like images in funhouse mirrors. The "9/11 Truth Movement", as it is known, is quick to seize on any straw to build up their theories. The Trade Towers were such tall structures -- why did they collapse straight down instead of topple over? Doesn't it require carefully controlled detonations to accomplish the same thing for planned demolitions? Obviously charges were arranged through the buildings.
Says Thomas Eager, a professor of materials science at MIT, who has investigated the collapse of the towers: "At first, I thought it was amazing that the buildings would come down in their own footprints. Then I realized that it wasn't that amazing -- it's the only way a building that weighs a million tons and is 95 percent air can come down."
The informal ideological leaders of the Truth Movement include theologian David Ray Griffin of Claremont University; philosopher James Fetzer of the University of Minnesota, who is also a long-time Kennedy assassination theorist; and economist Daniel Orr, retired from the University of Illinois. Steven Jones, a physics professor of Brigham Young University, is the main "technical expert", who insists that the destruction of the towers had to be a controlled demolition.
Griffin's book, THE NEW PEARL HARBOR, is something of a "bible" for the conspiracy theorists. He travels around giving lectures, telling audiences that the plot was an "inside job", claiming that "the welfare of our republic and perhaps the survival of our civilization" depend on unveiling the "conspiracy". The conspiracy theorists like to push the DVD movie LOOSE CHANGE, a "documentary" whose authenticity can be judged by their claim that the Empire State building was struck by a B-52 bomber and stayed up -- when the fact was that it was a B-25, a World War II aircraft about the size of a commuter turboprop and much slower than the massive jet Boeing B-52 or 767.
The conspiracy theorists believe the plot was concocted to justify American intervention in the MidEast. Many label President Bush as a "war criminal", though a surprising number think that he knew nothing of the plot. The CIA is the prime villain, but the Mossad -- the Israeli intelligence service -- or British intelligence are thought by some to be responsible or involved, apparently depending on whether the theorists are antisemites or anglophobes. Some even claim there were no airplanes and insist that New Yorkers who saw the event were all paid actors, or state that the passengers were spirited off elsewhere, to be either eliminated or left to rot in confinement.
As this suggests, while the conspiracy theorists are very strong in their convictions, they are in little agreement over the details. There are two main camps: "let it happen on purpose (LIHOP)" and "make it happen on purpose (MIHOP)", the terms describing the government's involvement in the attacks. The conspiracy theorists make much of pre-911 intelligence warnings, examine seeming discrepancies in the chain of events, and apply elaborate interpretations to obscure remarks of government officials on the day. There is no such thing as incompetence or accident in their Universe; everything that happened was part of an evil plan.
When told that these seem like slender threads to hang so much from and that such a major conspiracy would be hard to keep so secret, they claim the murkiness of the trail as evidence in itself of a conspiracy. The hidden message is: the evidence may be unconvincing, but nobody can prove us wrong.
The Truth Movement tends to accuse naysayers like MIT's Eager of being government stooges. Another naysayer, analyst Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates in Boston, a left-of-center think tank, does believe, not unarguably but at least with real basis in the hard facts, that the events of 911 demonstrate gross incompetence on the part of government officials. However, he calls the conspiracy theories "charlatanism", with the "evidence" they cite obtained from grainy pictures posted to the Internet and so on. Says Berlet: "I love THE X-FILES but I don't base my research on it. My vision of Hell is having to review these [conspiracy] books over and over again."
* ED: I try to be tolerant, but the lunatic fringe goes beyond the bounds. There's a difference between simply having unorthodox beliefs and making wild accusations, trying to sell unbelieveable stories and expecting people to buy off on them. The lunatic fringers are only out to muddy the waters, creating theories made out of bent paper clips, rubber bands, scotch tape, old shoelaces, and wads of chewing gum -- and then demanding refutation. Since refutation requires serious work while fabrications are easy, obviously they can win at that game forever. It's hard to respect people who don't have any concern for credibility.
Arizona Senator John McCain recently published an essay blasting the 911 conspiracy theorists, calling their accusations irresponsible and an insult to the government workers who moved mountains to respond to the disaster; an insult to those who were killed on 11 September 2001, particularly the public safety workers who died in the line of duty; and a distraction from the important work of confronting global terror. Alas, there is no way to get the conspiracy theorists to stop barking. The right to free expression implies the right to tell lies, at least to a degree, but certainly people can hold up a light to show the conspiracy theorists for the doubletalkers they are.
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- FOOD & FARMING (6): The other obvious component of agriculture is raising animals. The cattle industry is split between two distinctly different types of operations, dairying and beef production.
Dairying is of necessity a highly structured operation, since the cows have to be milked twice or even three times a day, every day. Of course they also have to be fed and otherwise cared for. Most US dairy cows are Holsteins, also known as Friesians, with prominent hip bones and coloration of black splotches on white. They are extremely efficient at converting feed to milk. Individual cows wear ear tags with an identifying number; these days, the tag increasingly also includes an RFID unit, which is scanned when the cow goes to the feed trough or the milking station, allowing the dairyman to keep accurate track of input and output.
In the old days, cows would be turned out to pasture in the morning and then brought in to milk, but though heifers may still range free for their childhood, usually the cows spend all their days indoors. For a time each was given her own stall, but now they wander freely through an open structure. They are doled out a proper mix of feed to ensure that they stay well fed.
The life cycle of a milk cow is very predictable. At an age of 14 or 15 months, she'll be bred, with the gestation period then lasting nine months, just like in humans. She'll be put to work giving milk for another year or so, and then bred again. Her time in productive breeding and milking will run about five years, maybe seven if she's unusually healthy. The comfortable lives of milk cows all end in the same grim way, however. Although Holsteins aren't bred to give nice juicy steaks, there's no problem in making hamburger out of them, and so once a cow's milk production goes below the profitable threshold she becomes a patty in a Big Mac.
The milking parlor is a sophisticated operation, with the cows backing up along a trench along the center, which allows the dairyman to work at the level of the udders. The teats are cleaned off and the four suction cups of the "claw" of the milking machine fitted up. The machine works automatically in a rhythymic fashion and then the claw falls off. Europe has been paving the way with completely robotic milking parlors, which allow a cow to be milked any time she feels like it. Robotic parlors are now starting to catch on in the US and Canada as well. Either way the milk is obtained, it is filtered and then dumped into a refrigerated tank. Every day or two a stainless-steel milk truck hauls the milk to a dairy for pasteurization, packaging, processing, and sale.
* If dairying is agribusiness at its most high-tech, cattle ranching remains more traditional, though RFID is making inroads there as it is across all animal husbandry. There are about 10 million dairy cows in the US, compared to about 100 million beef cows.
Beef cattle spend the first year of their lives on the range. When they reach a mass of about 270 kilograms (600 pounds), they are sorted out, the most promising sent off to do a stint as breeding stock, with the "losers" sent off to a feedlot for "finishing" -- the term having a double meaning in this case.
Cowboy flics suggests a certain nostalgia to life on the ranch, with cattle lassoed from horseback to drag them into the corral for branding, medication, castration, and so on. Rounding up cattle is actually much simpler these days, with the rancher simply dragging a bale of hay behind his pickup. Corrals are usually prefabricated steel pipe arrangements that can be set up on the range wherever they are needed.
There is nothing at all nostalgic about a feedlot, even in principle. Anybody who lives not far from one (as I do) can witness that they are not pleasant to be downwind of on a hot summer day. A feedlot can be simply described as a "cattle concentration camp", with the cattle penned into a lot to be fattened up for slaughter. The biggest feedlots can have tens of thousands of head. The feedlots usually don't own the cattle; essentially the operation is run as a paid service to the actual owners.
The cattle are fed dried corn, not so different from popcorn, that is usually crushed and sometimes also steamed. The corn is then mixed with a little silage and nutrients, to be dumped into a "bunk" -- a trough outside the edge of the feedlot where the cattle can push their head through the wire and eat their fill. The bunk is kept outside the lot so the cattle can't foul it easily. A water trough is also available, often on the other side of the pen to force the cattle to move around at least a bit. The corn-fed cattle grow big and fat quickly. The inmates can reach slaughtering weight, about 540 kilograms (1,200 pounds) before their second birthday.
A feedlot can be foul-smelling, but they're not too nasty to maintain, with the lot raked up about once a year or so. Mud does amount to a problem for all concerned, which is why feedlots tend to be sited in relatively dry areas.
Details of the slaughterhouse operation are obscure, probably because it's something few people want to know much about. Obviously it is as well organized process. I once ran into a fellow who had once been employed in the meat-packing industry, working as a technical writer to document the slaughtering and butchering processes. It sounds cold-blooded, but emphasizes the fact that all manufacturing processes run on documentation.
* Cattle are kept on the range by a barbed-wire or electric fence, but the road entries to the range are ungated, with the cattle kept inside solely by a "cattle guard". This is a shallow pit across the road between the fenceposts that is covered by a spaced set of steel rails. It's easy enough if a bit bumpy to drive across and any reasonably coordinated human can walk across one with no trouble, but cattle, fearing they may get their hooves caught, won't try to cross.
Nobody seems to remember the name of the clever person who came up with the idea. It is highly effective. Cattle won't even try to cross a set of white lines painted across an asphault roadway to make it look like a cattle guard. I have heard tales, however, that sheep of all things have figured out how to roll across them. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* PLASTIC PHOTOVOLTAICS: An article from September 2004 I found on the MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW website ("Solar-Cell Rollout" by Peter Fairley) gave the lowdown on an interesting emerging field of technology: plastic photovoltaic (PV) cells for obtaining power from sunlight.
Traditionally, PV cells have been made of semiconductor crystals, using processes much like those used to fabricate integrated circuits. There have been continuous improvements in the technology, but it still remains too expensive to compete with traditional power sources except in niches. Everybody's dream PV cell would be much easier and cheaper to manufacture, one vision being of PV cells rolled out as sheets of plastic.
The first step towards this goal was taken in the early 1990s, when two physicists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, N.S. Sariciftci and Alan Heeger, figured out a way to make a plastic PV cell by mixing conductive plastic with "buckyballs" -- the soccer-ball-shaped C60 molecule -- and pouring the mix onto a glass plate. The plate was spun to spread the mix into a thin film that was then sandwiched between electrodes. The conductive polymer would absorb electrons, with the buckballs draining them into the electrodes.
Initially, conversion efficiency from solar to electric power was only about 1%, but it was a start, and plastic PV cells seemed too promising to not follow up the experiment. Sariciftci kept up the work after he moved to Kepler University in Linz, Austria, in 1996, forming a team to try to increase the conversion efficiency of the device. Sariciftci worked with a young polymer researcher named Christoph Brabec to come up with an improved device.
Brabec left Sariciftci's lab in 2001 to work for German industrial giant Siemens. Brabec's group at Siemens has focused on further improved materials and processes, and now the plastic PV cells provide efficiencies of 10% or better -- a level regarded as the minimum threshold for practical application. Brabec thinks better efficiencies are possible and is now working to convert his lab technologies into something appropriate for factory production.
Siemens isn't the only company working on plastic PV cells. Konarka Technologies of Lowell, Massachusetts is working on a different approach to the technology, based on tiny semiconducting particles of titanium dioxide coated with light-absorbing dyes, bathed in an electrolyte, and embedded in plastic film. The Konarka cells are not particularly efficient, but they are ready for manufacture and are cheap, and company officials believe that they will fit into a niche powering cell phones, laptop computers, and other portable devices. The efficiency is likely to improve and make the devices attractive for a wider range of applications.
Nanosolar, a company in Palo Alto, California, is developing a PV cell implemented with a "self-assembly" process. Researchers spray a mix of alcohol, surfactants -- substances like those used in detergents -- and titanium compounds on a metal foil. As the alcohol evaporates, the surfactant molecules assemble into elongated tubes, erecting a molecular scaffold around which the titanium compounds accumulate. In less than a minute, a block of titanium oxide bored through with holes a few nanometers wide has been produced from the foil. Fill the holes with a conductive polymer, add electrodes, cover the whole block with transparent plastic, and the result is a efficient solar cell.
According to Nanosolar researchers, the fine-grained structure of their PV cell is what makes them efficient, since electrons produced by photons only have to travel a few nanometers at most before they are shunted off to an electrode. Nanosolar officials expect to obtain efficiencies of 10% and believe that the scheme could actually be spray-painted onto building tiles, vehicles, and billboards.
The major weakness of these schemes is that the materials oxidize very easily and become worthless. The challenge is to figure out how to seal them in reliably and at low cost, but advocates don't believe this is an insurmountable obstacle by any means.
* RING OF STEEL: Anybody who watches British-made suspense flics is aware of the "Ring of Steel (ROS)", the network of security cameras that protects London's central core, the "City", Britain and Europe's financial center. The ROS came online in 1998. Every vehicle that comes inside the ROS is photographed, with its license plate matched against a national police database and an image of the driver stored away for future reference.
According to an article in the July 2006 IEEE SPECTRUM ("Ring of Steel II" by Justin Mullins), the ROS was born out of a string of Irish Republican Army bombings in the early 1990s that killed four, injured dozens, and caused widespread damage. The London police began to put officers on the street to sort out suspicious vehicles, but that was clearly only a short-term fix. The process had to be automated.
At the time, trying to read license plates by machine was very difficult, particularly since plates could be seen at a wide range of angles under widely varying lighting conditions. The answer, obvious in hindsight, was to make things easier for the machine. Access to the City was limited to a few key roads that funneled traffic through specially designed lanes where cars had to slow down and were pointed directly at cameras under controlled lighting conditions. The design goal was successful read rate of 94%, and it was achieved.
The special lanes were something of a chokepoint, but that worked out well. People began to take the Tube more often and traffic fell off, improving air quality. Some roads that were no longer accessible were turned into pedestrian malls. Automatic license-plate recognition has matured and now it can attain a successful read rate of almost 100% under more or less uncontrolled traffic conditions.
The ROS features over 200 cameras, each sending a 3.8 megabit per second feed to a control room at a central police station. The stream from all the cameras has to be monitored in real time, and this requires 122 IBM xSeries servers with a total of 200 terabytes of storage to match imaged plates to a database of 82 million vehicles. The computer system will flag any suspicious vehicle and an officer will make a decision to take action if judged necessary.
In 2005, 38 million vehicles were scanned, with 91,000 flagged for infractions recorded on the national database. In 4,161 cases police action was taken, with a total of 539 arrests. An arrest for a small infraction sometimes leads to a major bust. The system flagged a black Porsche Cayenne whose driver had not been paying his leasing bills; when the police stopped the car and searched it, they found $20,000 USD in the glove box, leading to a major money-laundering investigation.
The ROS has taken a dent out of crime in the City, but to an extent the crime has simply moved elsewhere. People are also getting trickier about dealing with the system, for example obtaining license plates that use fonts that give machine character recognition systems a headache. There have been concerns over privacy and just how effective the system is for fighting terrorists. In the infamous 7 July 2005 bombings of the transport system, all four suicide bombers were imaged coming through the ROS.
London police officials flatly admit that the ROS can't do everything, but point out that nobody ever thought it would. The idea is catching on elsewhere. The New York City (NYC) Police Department is now installing 500 cameras and wants to expand the system into a ROS to protect lower Manhattan.
* DEATH OF A SPAMMER: A recent WIRED Online article ("The Sleazy Life and Nasty Death of Russian Spam King" by Brett Forrest) provided an interesting story of the rise and fall of a bigtime Russian spammer.
Technically, Vardan Kushnir was not Russian, but an Armenian living in Moscow. He had established a business there, the American Language Center (ALC), to teach English to Russians. He was also a spammer, sending out 25 million emails a day. He was prosperous enough to be a familiar face on the Russian club scene, where he was noted for his excess and obnoxious manners.
Kushnir grew up in Armenia, where he was raised by his mother Olga, his father having left the family. He was a bright schoolboy and got a slot into the Moscow Technological Institute of Light Industry. On graduation, he went to Los Angeles, returning to Moscow speaking English like a Yank. In 1994 he opened the ALC to pass his skills on to Russian students.
Kushnir really wanted to become a software developer, helping to establish a US-based company named Sophim, with the help of a partner in Florida. Sophim didn't take off, and Kushnir had to rely on ALC to keep him and his mother -- who had moved in with him in Moscow -- afloat. In 2001, he gave up on Sophim and decided to go into spamming. He found out that China was the best place to get a spam server, with $1,000 USD giving a month's rent on a server that could pump out seven million emails every day.
Kushnir was a quick study and figured out all the dodges. He used spam to promote ALC and brought in students, and though he wasn't what might be thought of as filthy rich in the USA, by Moscow standards he was doing well for himself and was throwing his money around. His spamming was overbearing and people sent him threats, but Kushnir was unmoved. He found such comfort as he needed by reading books on Scientology, and kept pumping up his spam.
In 2003, the Russian authorities began to take an unkindly interest in Kushnir, partly because his spam lists included a government official in the state communications ministry named Andrei Korotkov who didn't like being spammed. When Korotkov complained, he started getting spam addressed to him personally. There were no laws against spamming in Russia, so Kushnir felt free to blow Korotkov off. Korotkov even tried to counterspam, flooding ALC's phones with prerecorded messages, but Kushnir ramped up his spamming against Korotkov, sending him volumes of insulting messages, and Korotkov had to admit defeat.
Kushnir was not quiet about his misadventures with the authorities, boasting about his games to his acquaintances. He was well known in the club scene by that time, easily able to pick up girls who liked his notoriety and fat wallet. He was tiring of the ordinary sex games, however, gradually moving farther away from the mainstream into the sleaze scene.
He would boast about his kinky partying to his employees at ALC, which generally annoyed them. They were much more annoyed with him because he often didn't bother to pay them, stringing them along until they finally quit, with Kushnir finding another sucker as a replacement. When one employee confronted Kushnir, Kushnir suggested with a calm, blandly superior demeanor that the employee was overwrought and should obtain peace by reading L. Ron Hubbard. Kushnir was devoted to Hubbard's teachings, feeling that Scientology had brought him to a higher plane of awareness -- which of course translated into a condescending attitude to those around him that Kushnir didn't bother to conceal.
Not surprisingly, Kushnir had a lot of enemies. One night in the summer of 2005 he went to a club and came back to his apartment with a set of girls, one said to be only 15. His mother went to sleep in a studio apartment nearby to give him some privacy. The girls slipped Kushnir a knockout drug in a drink, but it only kept him out for a while; when he woke up, they beat him up. Several men then arrived, and when Olga came back into the apartment in the morning, Vardan Kushnir was lying cold and dead in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor, his skull beaten in. He was 35 years old. Some items had been taken and the police suspected it was a robbery that got out of hand, but there were a lot of people who would have liked Kushnir dead.
Olga Kushnir now runs ALC; the spam operation has been wound down. There were arrests, but the resolution of the case remains unclear. The authorities don't have a lot of incentive to worry about the murder of well-known obnoxious public nuisance. One Moscow tabloid summed up the attitude in a headline: SPAMMER HAD IT COMING.
* THE BLIND WATCHMAKER (7): Continuing our diversion through Paul Davies' THE FIFTH MIRACLE, we move back to a coarser view of the origins of life. The Earth seems to be about 4.5 billion years old, with the earliest traces of life being about 3.5 billion years old and our oxygen atmosphere about two billion years old -- though it wouldn't resemble the modern atmosphere for about another half-billion years.
The first billion years of the Earth's existence, as suggested by the cratered surface of our Moon, were characterized by asteroid and comet impacts -- sometimes really big impacts, powerful enough to boil off the oceans, with things not returning to normal for a millennia. The odd thing is that once this "hard rain" slackened off, ending its periodic sterilizations of the surface of the planet, life arose within a few hundred million years. As mentioned, some of the optimists believe that this suggests the inevitability of the rise of life, but there is an interesting alternate point of view that suggests life began well before the end of the hard rain era.
The hint comes from microorganisms known as "extremophiles". One of the first to be known was the bacterium Thiobacillus thiooxidans, which likes to live in solutions so acidic that they will dissolve metals, and certainly will kill off any competitors. Other extremophiles have been found that liked very salty, or alkaline, or hot environments.
It is the heat-loving extremophiles or "thermophiles" that are of interest here. Some are capable of thriving in environments at temperatures of a hundred degrees Celsius or more, hot enough to boil water. Ideas that such thermophiles might be able to live deep underground go back to the 1920s, but it wasn't until the 1980s that live samples were obtained from drill cores. There was considerable skepticism at first, the critics claiming the bacteria were contaminants that originated in the surface world, but the evidence piled up and the critics had to admit defeat. Deep-underground thermophiles have been cultured in pressure cookers, something no surface world contaminant is likely to find a benign environment. It is now generally believed that such thermophiles form a layer into the surface of the Earth at least half a kilometer deep, and possibly well deeper.
The interesting idea is: maybe life began underground. The heat there would provide all the energy needed, all the required elements would be available as well, and even the most massive impacts would not disturb the underground world much. The concept was first put forth by Jack Corliss of the University of Maryland in 1981, to be promoted further by a paper written by astrophysicist Tommy Gold in 1992. The idea was not greeted enthusiastically at first, but it is gaining converts. One interesting fact in its favor is that some deep-underground bacteria have unusual, seemingly archaic, features in their metabolic cycles, as if they were precursors to surface bacteria.
* Another theory in some circulation is the idea that life started someplace else other than Earth and was transplanted here. The idea is far from new, having been put forward by the great Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius early the 20th century, but it was generally a sci-fi concept until the 1980s.
The item that advanced the "extraterrestial origins" theory was the analysis of strange meteorites known as "SNCs", the acronym standing for the three locations where they were found -- Chassigny in France (1815), Nakhla in Egypt (1911), and Shergotty in India (1865). The "snicks" had strange compositions, with a high proportion of volatiles and (as was found once chemical isotopes were understood) odd oxygen isotope ratios. In particular, they were made up of igneous -- volcanic -- rock. Most meteorites come from asteroids and comets, which don't have volcanoes. Volcanoes are associated with planets.
In the early 1980s, radioactive dating showed the SNCs ranged from 180 million to 1.3 billion years old. Asteroids and comets, in contrast, date from the origin of the solar system and are about 4.6 billion years old. This led to the idea that the SNCs were fragments of some other planet, Mars being the prime suspect, ejected into space by meteorite impacts and then swept up by the Earth. An analysis of gases in a bubble inside a SNC showed that the gas composition matched that of the atmosphere of Mars, and the idea that the SNCs were from Mars became generally accepted.
A few years later meteorites were recovered from the ice sheets around the Allan Hills in Antarctica. One, designated ALH84001 -- the "ALH" standing for "Allan Hills" -- proved to be a Mars meteorite under inspection by researchers at the US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA). Further careful analysis of isotopes embedded in its surface layer showed that it had been in space for about 16 million years; and the decay of these isotopes from the time ALH84001 fell to Earth and stopped being bathed in cosmic radiation meant it had been lying on the Antarctic ice for about 16,000 years.
It was the next stage of analysis that was interesting. Close inspection showed that ALH84001 contained tiny blobs of carbonate materials that contained hydrocarbons and what looked like sausage-shaped fossils. The evidence suggested that ALH84001 contained evidence of Martian bacteria. A public announcement was made by NASA in 1996, though the researchers were careful to say that the evidence was merely suggestive and did not remotely amount to proof. There was considerable excitement over the announcement, but many rebuttals followed, and these days only a minority seems to be persuaded.
Still, the idea that there might have been bacteria on Mars in the distant past remains intriguing. If life did arise there, it may persist deep underground even now. NASA's two Viking Mars landers of the 1970s did perform searches for life using a set of instruments that actually gave positive indications, but the conclusion of the research teams for the instrument was that the positive results were simply due to unusual chemical activity of Martian soil, as observed in control experiments performed by the two landers.
The concept that life might be found on Mars is a prod to further exploration of the planet. What we do know about the planet at this time makes it certain that in the distant past Mars, now dry and covered with a thin atmosphere, had plenty of water and a thick atmosphere, possibly making it a fine place for life to start. If Martian microbes are indeed found by Mars explorers and if these microbes prove to be completely unrelated to Earth microbes, that would be powerful evidence that the spontaneous origin of life on Earth wasn't a massive fluke.
Incidentally, few think that Martian microbes might be dangerous to Earth life: pathogens are generally adapted to infecting specific hosts, and Martian microbes simply wouldn't know what to make of Earth creatures. Samples will of course be strictly quarantined, but mostly to make sure they aren't contaminated by Earth microorganisms and so rendered useless. Reassuring the public would also be an important motive.
However, what if Martian microbes resemble Earth microbes? Then that opens the possibility that life arose on Mars and then "infected" the Earth. Bacteria can form spores that can sit in suspended animation almost indefinitely, and if the spores are buried in a chunk of rock they would be protected from space radiation. Of course, this works both ways: if meteorites from Mars landed on Earth, then meteorites from Earth might have landed on Mars and "infected" the planet to begin with.
* Others have suggested that comets, which are full of organic materials, might have been a good breeding ground for life, and helped seed the Earth and possibly Mars. Fred Hoyle was a particular advocate for this idea. However, all this remains speculation, and certainly sidesteps the vital, exasperating question of how the engine got running in the first place. Nobody really knows.
A critic will pounce on this uncertainty to blast the notion of the spontaneous origin of life, but of course it's one thing to say that there are uncertainties in these theories -- and very much another to say that because of these uncertainties, the spontaneous origin of life is flatly ruled out. It's basically the same question as considering whether life is common in the Universe, and just as much a matter of opinion as to whether it seems impossible or plausible, with no strong argument to nail it down either way. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* DIRECT FROM THE COMBAT ZONE: The fact that US military personnel fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan now have access to the Internet has allowed the troops to keep the citizens back home informed on what's happening in the combat zone. According to a BBC WORLD Online article, the brass sometimes thinks the citizens are being informed too much.
Blogs maintained by soldiers are one thing, but the Pentagon is particularly worried about some of the pictures and videos posted online -- with some of the videos set to rock or hiphop music soundtracks. Says a military public affairs officer: "There's continuing concern about the use of these videos and stills being used by our enemies to propagate the false notion that our military members are barbaric, warmongers -- which is unequivocally not the case. And ... many of these videos and photos can harm force protection and operational security measures."
In one video posted online, American troops are observing a group of suspected insurgents who they believe are hiding weapons in a field. They discuss the situation among themselves, call up the chain of command to request approval for action, and get the green light. They kill three of the insurgents and destroy their two vehicles. To anybody with even a distant familiarity with warfare, this is clearly an ordinary combat scenario and nothing that could be construed as a war crime, but it's also an exercise in voyeurism and not what the military wants to be sending back home to the civilians.
US Central Command does monitor the Web, but officially they only do so to correct inaccurate information. Websites that post shocking videos say that they're not trying to be "notorious", they just want the troops to be able to tell the folks back home what soldiers have been enduring in the field. The military does seem to be soft-pedaling their efforts to control the flow of information. They realize that the heavy-handed approach would likely be counterproductive, instead commenting when materials be construed as doing harm to the collective interests of the military.
* ANOTHER MONTH: I finally got the backlog cleaned out in uploading pictures to the website photography archive. The total came to 795 pix taken from 2004; since I was so close to 800, I went through my CD-ROM archives of raw photos to find useful shots that I had passed over, and was able to get about ten more in the pipeline. Not surprisingly, on second inspection some of the "left-overs" turned out to be pretty good shots.
Building the archive was a lot of time. I figure that it takes at least an hour to process five pix -- sorting them out, archiving them, tweaking them with a photo editor, setting up the web page links to the pictures, uploading them, and verifying the upload. It's helped squeeze me on time since I began the archive on 1 April. Now it's just a question of adding new pix as I take them.
* The Web is such a fascinating place. I was sitting in the tub reflecting on my appalling indifference to local politics, and realizing that I had no clear idea of who my elected representatives were. After I got out of the tub and dried off, I got to thinking: "I wonder if there's a site where I can enter my postal code and get all that information?"
I took me all of a few minutes to find it: "www.vote-smart.org". Works like a charm, too, providing all the information any casual visitor might want. I might actually start hanging around there just to get some data on the folks who send me flyers all the time.
It has to be taken with a grain of salt, however. The Vote-Smart site pushes a "National Political Awareness Test (NPAT)" for politicians that tries to nail down where they stand on issues. It's a "multiple-choice" poll that, as is often the case with such things, funnels the answers for complicated issues into sets of more or less simplistic categories. A politician would easily be forgiven for replying: "I do have a voting record available to the public, you know, and if you want to ask my views on particular subjects I will be glad to respond in an articulate fashion."
Wikipedia is actually a fairly good source of information on politicians above a certain modest level of prominence -- finding all my Federal representatives is easy and I could even find materials on my state representatives. It's actually fairly neutral on them because the partisans on both sides who try to edit the article end up coming to a compromise, though sometimes only after fighting each other to exhaustion.
I'm really beginning to appreciate the Wikipedia, though I would never post an article to it. I've had run-ins with their bureaucracy; to a degree the bureaucracy is necessary, but it's still obnoxious to deal with, reminiscent of the old joke: "Not all system administrators become egomaniacs, control freaks, and petty tyrants. Some are born that way."
* Which leads to the dark side of the web. I have a utility provided by my ISP that allows me to backtrack hits into the website, and I check it several times a day, both to get some information on people visiting the site and to spot-check the documents they are visiting -- making sure they have been properly uploaded and their formatting is correct.
One backtrack took me without warning into a neo-Nazi forum, with the members spouting off wild antisemitism and talking about the ZOG. "ZOG"? It rang a bell -- Zionist Occupation ... Group? I looked it up on Wikipedia and it popped back into my head: oh right, the "Zionist Occupation Government", meaning the "filthy Jew-dominated US government." It is an indication of how extreme the white-supremacist fringe is that they consider the Bush II Administration to be left-leaning. They were downright foaming blood out the mouth during the Clinton Administration.
The antisemitic right has its amusing aspects, one being that there is a skein in Japanese ultra-nationalism, going back to before World War II, that also believes that there is global Jewish conspiracy. This seems surprising since the number of synagogues in Japan might be thought to be counted on the fingers of one hand, but the belief isn't based on antisemitism as such: the ultra-nationalists think the conspiracy is a good idea that Japan ought to co-opt or emulate. Even in lunacy, the Japanese put their own distinctive twist on things.
The Wikipedia article also tipped me off to websites warning of the "COG" conspiracy, where "COG" stands for "Creedish Occupation Government" -- in which the Amish are calling all the shots. I keep having an idea to put together yet another section on the site, which will be a fake supermarket tabloid titled WEEKLY PLANETARY NEWS that covers the lunatic and joker fringe. I would only post to it once a week, but I still haven't figured out how I would keep it running for very long even at that rate.