Programming, Rosetta Stones and French Toast

It´s tricky trying to explain Software Engineering to people who know nothing about Software. It´s difficult enough explaining it to Programmers. But explaining Programming, and Programming languages to people who know nothing about Computers is comparatively easy.

I´m giving it a shot anyway. This post attempts to explain programming to non-programmers, though even they might find an insight or two.

Anyone who's ever followed a recipe when cooking has "executed a program". A program is merely a set of data (ingredients) and an algorithm (method) for manipulating the data. So a recipe for French Toast may say something like "Take an egg, and a slice of bread. Beat the egg, then dip the bread in it until soaked. Then put the bread is a lightly greased saucepan and cook till golden brown."

The egg and bread are ingredients that get transformed by the process; but the saucepan iand stove are also ingredients too, though they don't change. They're constants.

Such things as the exact size of the egg, and the exact size of the slice of bread aren't stated. It's assumed they´re about average - and that the egg is a hen´s egg, rather than one from a Quail or an Ostrich. It's also assumed that the bread is white, that a normal-sized saucepan is available, that there´s an unstated means of heating it to a reasonable temperature, and the exact amount of grease (and type of oil) is not defined. It´s also not stated what you do with the French toast afterwards, nor that it would be a really good idea not to leave the saucepan heating on the stove after you´ve finished.

There´s an awful lot of assumed knowledge in that simple recipe. It will work very well though, provided the assumptions are valid. Attempt to follow it with a saucepan only 3 cm in radius (as some for cooking fruit for crepes are), or using Pumpernickel, or an Ant's egg, or without a stove, or using a Blast Furnace, and it is unlikely to produce useful results.

Alas, Computers do not have "Common Sense". They won´t check the assumptions unless specifically ordered to do so. Programming a Robot to cook french Toast would be non-trivial. Even getting it to pick up the toast and transfer it into the pan would be a major exercise. The Human Nervous System does some very spectacular processing when picking something up, involving the co-ordination of many muscles, feedback loops so that objects are grasped firmly, neither crushed nor too loosely, based upon the sense of touch.

Next time you cook, or even walk, think about what you´re doing: but be careful. Most functions, like walking, are performed largely automatically, rather than requiring conscious intervention. Consciousness, while immensely powerful, is slow. If you think about things too much you may end up flat on your face.

Programmers have invented a multitude of special notations for writing these complicated instructions. When you get down to the lowest level of the electronics, the computer is capable of understanding only a very few basic operations. To add 2 numbers, for example, might require several separate instructions: one to take a number form memory and put it in a "Register" or place where you can perform mathematical operations. Another instruction to take another number from memory and put in into another Register. A third instruction to take the contents of the two Registers and add them together into one of the two previously-used Registers. And a final instruction to take the result and put it somewhere in memory for later use. All of these instructions are represented by simple numbers, 348 might mean "Add Register 4 to Register 7 and put the Result in Register 4" for example. But it´s more usual to write the instructions in a slightly less cryptic form, in an Assembly Language notation. So instead of writing 348 the programmer will write ADD R4,R7, which a simple program called an Assembler will translate to 348.

But it´s possible to make more complex programs that take much higher-level, human-understandable instructions like "Let A = A+B;", and have them automatically translated or "compiled" into machine-readable code. And that brings me to the subject of different Computer Languages.

The Hello World collection is something of a Rosetta Stone for them. It´s traditional for neophyte programmers to learn how to write a program that does nothing but print the words "Hello World!" as their first step in learning a new language. If you have a look at the entry in the collection for, say, Ada, you will see that there is a lot of impedimenta in even the highest level language. (By the way, there is a mistake in the example, Hello is spelt Hallo in the end Hello; bit, showing how easy it is to make an error in even the simplest task. The example won´t Compile.).

If you´re game, have a look at the Z-80 Assembler version, which is at a very low level indeed. Most of the words in it are "Comments", text which is not processed by the assembler program, but only there to explain to a human reader what the heck is happening, and why it´s being done that way. You will see why Programmers prefer high-level languages, and why Assembler programmers tend to look down their noses on people who do things the easy way.

Another, more advanced Rosetta Stone is the one for the Towers of Hanoi game. This game involves 3 poles, and a number of rings with holes in the middle, of differing sizes, with the largest at the bottom and the smallest at the top, all on the rightmost pole. The idea is to move the rings to the left pole, one at a time. You can move the rings to any pole you like, but at no time must a larger ring sit on top of a smaller ring.

Again, take a look at the example for Ada, and the example for i860 Assembler.

OK, that´s it. I´ve simplified things a bit, but not by much. You should now have a undertanding of Programming, what it is and what it isn´t. So next time some Geek tries to blind you with Science by saying "I´m translating some FORTRAN into BASIC, but I´d really like to re-do it in Assembler." you will have some idea what that means.

Serendipity

I regularly review the sites in the "Referral" list. OK, it´s for ego-boo. But also, it´s because I regularly find treasures there, interesting URLs I never would have found otherwise. And to be a source for Interesting URLs is one of the prime reasons for this blog´s existence.

The political and just-plain-good blogs I link to are an eclectic bunch. I haven´t chosen them to represent any sort of "Spectrum of Opinion", though they certainly do that. They authors have several things in common: be they Libertarian/Randite or Marxist, 55- or 15-years old, they´re able to teach something, and willing to listen to and learn from differing opinions, with courtesy and respect.

But getting back to the concrete, here are some good ones that I've found recently.

Tram Town is an Ozblog I'm sorry I've missed before. Reading through the archives is consuming much of my valuable time, but the quality makes it compulsive reading. Had I not come across this, I might never have known about the Stairways to Heaven CD, where a multitude of artists give their renditions - or renderings (as in "Rent : to tear asunder" or "Render : To deconstruct by boiling") the Led Zeppelin classic "Stairway to Heaven".

They also have a banner link to one of my favourite Weird Wide Web URLs, Britney Spears Guide to Semiconductor Physics.

Another Goodie is Hold the Mayo. This one I didn´t get directly from the referrer´s list, but via the Rocket Man. Who by the way has some interesting calculations showing why building a SSTO (single Stage To Orbit) lifter is so much harder than building a 747.

This blog has a good article about those of us who were born in the era of the Beatles, the tail-end of the 50s, the just-post-baby-boomers and just-pre-Generation Xers. In a blog chock full of interesting posts, he makes a stunning confession:

(and I work in marketing!).

See, I told you it was an eclectic mix. (I´m puzzled about this white stuff called "snow" of which he speaks though.)

G'Day Whackers

One of my favourite Ozblogs, Whacking day was most complimentary in a link to this site.
I owe Tex a beverage-of-choice: not so much for the link, but for the many months of enjoyment and intellectual stimulation I've had from his site.

And Apropos of nothing whatsoever, here's a (slightly edited) post I made to a mailing list recently, on the subject of Spin and the Media:

Here's an illustrative scenario, as I see it:

Reality: 3 Iraqi teenagers in Falujah out to prove their manhood open fire
a few bursts with their AK-47s at a passing HMMV, missing completely. The
US soldiers, lacking a clear target, withold fire. One unlucky 7-year-old
a few streets away gets burnt by a spent bullet, is patched up by a US first
aid post and sent home.

As reported by....

CENTCOM: At 0150 an incident occurred at Falujah. Shots were fired, and one
Iraqi civilian was lightly wounded and evacuated to a US army hospital. There
are no other casualties reported at this time.

FOX: American forces beat off yet another attack by Saddam Loyalists today,
and although Pentagon sources refused to be drawn on enemy casualties, they
are reported to be heavy, with none of our boys wounded. Enemy bullets just
bounced off our Hummer Tanks, and American Marksmanship and laser-guided
rounds soon cut down the attackers, who broke and fled.

BBC: Are American Forces panicking? That's the question all Iraqis are asking
today, as reports of yet another massacre by out-of-control US soldiers reached
Baghdad. Several children, some as young as 18 months, are reported killed by the US
forces indiscriminate use of massive firepower, including Tanks and Helicopter
Gunships. Eyewitnesses say that the Americans may have mistaken a car backfiring
for an attack, and started spraying automatic weapons fire indiscriminately.

CNN: The Iraqi quagmire continues, with continued attacks on US forces,
escalating in violence. In the latest, as always, the victims of US retaliation
were mainly civilians, often as young as seven. Today's special report is on these,
the most innocent victims of the "War Against Terror" - the Children.

NPR : Yet another blow to the Bush administration today, as US forces came
under sustained attack for several hours. Reports of heavy civilian casualties
keep coming in, and the question is, what is our Exit Strategy now?

Stairway to Heaven

As famous composers might have written it. From Gustav Mahler to Glenn Miller, Beethoven to Bizet, and performed by the University of NSW Symphony Orchestra. Listen to it, and you too will realise that there's such a thing as genetically-engineered music.
(Seen via a comment on LGF)

Then there´s the inimitable way Rolf Harris renders it, which is in a class of it's own. Thank God.

Criswell Brain Predicts

I normally contribute most of my observations on the Global (rather than local) political scene over on The Command Post. Which incidentally has been periodically snapshotted by the US Library of Congress as a "Site of Historical Importance", so my words have been captured for posterity. (Thinks: I wonder what Scholars in the 2600s are going to think of this?) But I digress.

One observation I recently made was over at Tim Blair's Blog. It was in the nature of 4 predictions. See how I did :

Predictions of coming SMH and Indimedia stories:

1. Seething over the inhumane treatment of a Prisoner of War being shown in a degrading video. Allegations that this is a War Crime and Bush the War Criminal. Calls for his trial by an International tribunal. Bush that is, not Saddam.
2. It's taken Halliburton 8 months to grow a Clone using their diabolical Genetic Modification techniques. They got the DNA from the martyred children, Uday and Orsay. It's a fake by a fake President, just like 9/11 and the Moon Landings were faked. And it's all Bush's fault.
3. Yeah, yeah, they captured Saddam. But what about Bin Laden? Iraq's a Quagmire, and it's all a plot by Bush to mislead the Murican People and get them to forget about important stuff. Like the genetically-modified plastic turkeys they forced the soldiers to eat.
4. It's actually bad news, this will trigger off a whole new round of attacks on America and its Allies. Australia will be less safe than before because of.... well, just because. And it's all Howard's fault. And Bush's.

Those were the predictions. Here's the Reality:

1. From Medienkritik :

   (German TV station) n-tv ("Bilderserie"): As a proof he (Bremer) presented the pictures of the caught arch enemy, even though the showcasing of POW's is forbidden by the Geneva Convention.

   and from The Australian :

   It was beyond belief that anyone could feel compassion for Saddam Hussein in the wake of his capture, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said today.
   
   Some critics have expressed concern about images being broadcast around the world of the haggard former dictator of Iraq after his capture by US troops.
   
   But Mr Downer said the broadcasts were not in contravention of international laws.



2. From columnist and noted intellectual Phillip Adams, in The Australian :

   Ok, he looks like Saddam Hussein. He sounds like Saddam Hussein. And, yes, he has the same DNA. But can we be sure that it is, in fact, the former Iraqi leader? And not just some poor turkey? Another of his hapless body doubles? Or even a clone?

3. From The Australian :

   Joseph Cirincione, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, characterised the dictator's capture as "largely irrelevant in the larger war against terrorism".
   
   "Saddam means nothing to al-Qa'ida and all the al-Qa'ida-like forces," he said.
   
   It is bin Laden who singlehandedly "has bedeviled American efforts on the war against terrorism", Time magazine editor-at-large Michael Elliott wrote yesterday.
   
   "The capture of Saddam helps, but so long as bin Laden remains at large, all the power and high-tech wizardry of the American armed forces are still losing the battle...

4. George Galloway :

   This will not stop the Iraqi resistance... if anything, it may set the resistance free, if you like, from the cloud of Saddam Hussein, and transform it into a purely national resistance movement without the charge that it's being controlled from behind by the deposed president.

Silly me. I thought these comments would be by the Moonbats at Indimedia, the same people who believe that the Moon Landings were faked and that Bush uses Zionist Orbital Mind Control Lasers on the "Sheeple" to keep them in line. The people who think the "X-Files" and "Bowling for Columbine" are documentaries. But I hedged my bets and mentioned the Anti-War Sydney Morning Herald as well, not that I thought mainstream media, and especially not The Australian (my dnoc as Norman Geras would say) could be quite so loony. Oh well, you live and learn.

How to Dispose of a Monster

Can we take it as read that Saddam Hussein is a mass-murderer responsible for hundreds of thousands of gruesome deaths? Good.

I'm against the Death Penalty.

There are some very exceptional circumstances where I consider it tolerable. Not desirable, but tolerable. In cases of Cruel and Unusual Crimes, it may be a lesser Evil. It may bring such vast relief to relatives of victims that Justice has been seen to be done that the harm is greatly outweighed by the good. But that alone is not sufficient for me to approve, merely not condemn. In cases where the mere existence of someone as a living breathing entity will cause danger and human suffering - such as the threat of sypathisers taking hostages to procure his release, then on Utilitarian grounds the criminal should be disposed of, and quickly, and that I'd thoroughly approve of without reservation. Both grounds apply in this case. So although I'm against the Death Penalty, for Saddm Hussein I'm more than willing, I'm almost enthusiastic about making an exception.

But I'd never ask anyone - a hangman or executioner, to do something I wouldn't do myself, nor approve of it. And that leads to a moral quandry.

Justice, even tempered by mercy, cannot be done to Saddam Hussein. His crimes are so enormous that there is literally no punishment I can think of that is even remotely appropriate to fit the crime. Even such barbarities as slowly feeding him into a shredder feet-first, or giving him a succession of sub-lethal doses of mustard gas until he's insane with the pain isn't enough. It's a mere shadow of what he's done to others, and he only has one body, so the process couldn't be repeated even once, let alone hundreds or thousands of times. And even that inadequate measure is not something I could ever condone, nor bring myself to do. It sickens me. I'm sure there are many medically trained people who can think of far worse things, while keeping him alive for far longer. But that way lies Madness, the philosophy of such physicians as Dr Mengele. Similarly any medical experimentation involving vivesection, even if it would do physical good. Because it would do us, the executioners, irrepairable spiritual harm.

Several solutions commend themselves though:

1. Let him go - to walk free from the Courtroom, and into the tender mercies of the Iraqi populace. You know the phrase "He was torn to pieces by the Mob"? Well, it can be literally true. Everyone can get a bit. This may be the solution that gives greatest closure while not soiling our own dainty hands with his blood. We may have to do this, as in any Adversarial system of Law, there's no way he could be given a "fair trial" in the accepted definition of the term. But this smacks of acting as Pontius Pilate.
2. Pretend we hadn't found him. Put him back where he was, in the spider hole. Fill the entrance with bricks, just as it was when they found him. Then park a Tank on top for, oh, six months. Let the relatives of his victims visit the site, and allow them to listen carefully to see if he's still screaming. A more humane (because quicker) variation would be to Install a toilet whose drain leads to his personal septic tank and sepulchre. But even that I find personally distasteful, even thinking about it makes me feel soiled spiritually.
3. Televise the Torture Chamber, take him in there, close the door and cut the TV coverage, and play pre-recorded fake screams for a few days while quietly killing him immediately. By all means harvest all usable organs, and I'm not too bothered about whether the anaesthetic merely paralyses him, or causes unconsciousness. Keep the head (minus corneas) for placing on a suitable pikestaff.

The last of the three seems to me to be the best solution. It provides comfort to the grieving, perhaps saves a few lives, and causes minimal damage to our souls with minimal hypocracy. He's done enough damage already.

But I'm open to other suggestions, ranging from the traditional (burning at the stake) to the modern (radiation poisoning).

Wormholes and FTL

No, when I say "Wormholes" I don't mean Saddam's hiding place.

New Scientist reports on some calculations regarding FTL (Faster Than Light) travel, and conclude that it may just be possible. But a bit costly :

To keep the wormhole open wide enough would take a negative field equivalent to the energy that would be liberated by converting the mass of Jupiter.

That's a serious engineering problem.

(Seen via En Banc, an interesting Legal Blog.)

The Dark Side of the Claus

Anyone else think he looks like some malignant , malevolent Santa Claus? Not so much Saint Nick as Old Nick?

Meanwhile, have a look at the reactions carefully selected by the BBC. You can't make this stuff up.

It's good that it's clarified where Saddam Hussein is now. But I do not hope that people forget now that George W. Bush has lead the world into a war without proof of WMD and a connection to Osama bin Laden. What Bush did was wrong. And Americans need to remember that next year when the presidential elections take place.
Michelle Mauriere, Leipzig, Germany

Americans must not lose sight of the fact that what this is, is a war on terror - are we closer to the goal of that? I doubt it, when you consider the ground realities in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention elsewhere in the Middle East.
Uma, Mumbai, India

The American administration must now be very nervous. If a proper war crimes tribunal is allowed, Saddam will implicate most of them (and previous UK administrations as well). I think we should think where Saddam's support, funds and weapons came from when he was actually committing the worst atrocities for which he may now stand trial.
Peter Budek, Bedford

I don't see the arrest of Saddam Hussein making any difference to the coalition's problems in Iraq. This establishes Bin Laden as the world's No1 terrorist, and I suspect that the Iraqi dissidents will now turn to him to organise their campaigns against the coalition forces, if they have not done so already. All that will be derived from this is a couple of days good PR for Bush and Blair.
Frank Redmond, London, UK

But hey, in the interests of balance they give opposing viewpoints too. The next comments are:

The capture of Saddam is good news for world peace that cannot be denied. But the capture of him alive is an even better result. In essence, what the Bush Administration do with him now is the key. We can only hope this will prove yet another spectacular failure on their part that will result in a continued, inflammatory and detrimental reaction in Iraq and elsewhere around the globe. In turn this should prove yet another disaster for Bush and his re-election plans. In the long run it is this ultimately that is an even better prospect for world peace. Don't be too surprised if you see Saddam smiling.
Derrick Donald, Sydney, Australia

Great! Now some stability might return to Iraq. While they put him on trial for war crimes, they can put Blair and Bush on trial too. Lets not forget they waged an unprovoked war of aggression without a UN mandate, and they lied to their electorate regarding the "Intelligence!
Derek Haslam, South Shields

Can't be any fairer than that. At least, the BBC can't.

Find your own Ethical Philosophy

Seen on Quidquid Requiritur is yet another quiz. This one's interesting. It attempts to determine your own Ethical Philosophy.

For what it's worth, my own results (Top three) were:
1. Kant (100%)
2. John Stuart Mill (94%)
3. Jeremy Bentham (81%)

Certainly I must do some study on Kantian Philosophy. From what little I've read, I like the cut of his jib. I've always considered myself more a Utilitarian/Benthamite than anything else, so the quiz is at least partly accurate. Then again, there are dozens of Philosophers not on the list, and only 12 questions. But not a bad first approximation to the truth, given those conditions.

Nature, Nurture, and Nazis

As the parent of a 2-year-old son, I have a more-than-passing interest in the development of small children. My studies of the Human Central Nervous System seen as a computational device lead me to believe that the differences between the most intelligent of us, and the most "developmentally challenged" are relatively small. Not exactly "lost in the noise", but not far off that.

Yet my experiences at school and University lead me to the opposite conclusion: that there is a very large difference in capability between the A-students and what we used to call the "Duhh Division". People who were quite bright, just not educationally gifted nor intellectually inclined.

Now why should this be so? The Human brain starts off with rather more grey cells than it needs - so much so that many of them die off before puberty completes. What's important is not the number of neurons, but the richness of the connectivity, how they self-organise. While the number of components decreases with age, the interconnections increase, and the behaviour becomes "richer". To take an analogy, it's not the power of the computer you have on your desk, it's whether you're on the Internet or not.

So much for the computer-science view.

From the pediatric behaviour view, I've observed that some kids are just natural learners, from age Nought. You can't stop them from exploring, getting into things, examining books ( OK, so it's mostly by taste..) and sampling other interesting items. At least one toddler of my acquaintance is a real handful, and has managed to destroy or damage several hundred dollars worth of electrical equipment (fortunately most of it was repairable).

Others are quiet, curious but not overly-so, and seem content with examining computers without wishing to disassemble them to see how they work.

So my hypothesis in the great "Nature vs Nurture" debate is that some kids will excell, regardless of any environmental difficulty that besets them. Too poor to own books? They'll find a Library for themselves. School a dead loss? Well, they'll just get themselves an education despite the Teachers, outside of school hours.

Other children of equal potential ability require a more benign environment. One where there is a Social Reward for study. A society which looks up to and respects Scholarship, rather than one where material Wealth is the only route to respect. Without peer or parental pressure, they'll just go-with-the-flow, gaining "street smarts" but nothing else. And if the wealthiest, most respected people in the neighbourhood are the Crack dealers, then why should they be any different? (And by the way, don't disparage street-smarts. Those of us with a touch of Asperger's Syndrome have great difficulty reading people. Computers and Rocket Science is so much easier, take it from me... )

All of these thoughts were inspired by a post I read over at Little Green Footballs, about how a section of the German "Peace" Movement is raising funds for the Ba'athist thugs in Iraq. You know, the people who not only kill US soldiers, but also Red Cross workers etc and generally try to make everyone as poor as possible so they can regain power. The Ba'ath, or to give it its official title, the Arab National Socialist Party.

My immediate reaction was "Ah, the Germans keeping up the fine old tradition of National Socialism". I was reminded of a poster I'd quoted in an earlier post on this blog. The one that reads "Check the Warmongers of the World". It seems apt for this new German National Socialist "Peace" movement. Then I thought about it for a while. You see, I spent about 5 years working in Germany, at Atlas Electronik GmbH. I should be the last person to engage in even midly racist German-bashing. I really enjoyed my time there, I met a lot of people who I both liked personally and had immense professional respect for. I liked Bremen.

And yet... Bremen is a nice place, but there was something missing. It took me a while to figure it out. Eventually, it was a memorial near Domsheide ( Cathedral Heath ), near the statue of Roland by the Schnoorviertel (Schnoor quarter - a remnant of Medieval Bremen) that clued me in. It was to a group of Bremers who had been beaten to death on that spot for the crime of being Jewish. What was missing were the Synagogues, the Kosher Delicatessens and Butcheries, a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that had been lost, maiming the whole social body.

In the 30's the German Nation and People had gone mad, and blown their own brains out. Even the late-and-unlamented Dr Haber, who did so much to ensure that Prussia was able to first use Poison Gas in World War One, had been persecuted for being a Jew. A large slice of the Doctors, Intellectuals, Scientists and Engineers in Germany had been ... liquidated. Converted to Soap, Lampshades, and Soot. But how come so many of the Best and Brightest were Jewish?

That led me to think about what it means to be a Jew. I'm not a Red Sea pedestrian myself (though with one Jewish Great-Grandmother I may well have qualified for Auschwitz). I don't have the right to consider myself an heir to the victims of the Holocaust - except inasmuch as I'm a Human Being, just like them. But is Judaism a Religion? Yes, but I know several Israeli Jews who are convinced atheists. In fact, Atheism seems to be the norm for many. Is it a Race? I've met Jews who were "Black as the Ace of Spades" to use a very non-PC phrase, and others who were purebred Han Chinese. So that one can be discarded. Is it a Nationality? Perhaps.. but if so, it's separate from the state of Israel. There are plenty of Israeli Bedouins and Druze, and plenty more Jews who are anti-Zionists. Israel as a state did not exist from 70 AD to 1949 AD, but Judaism most certainly did.

One stereotype about Jews that from my own experience is more true than not is that they're Swots. Nerds. Not exactly teacher's pets, but more likely to get A's than D's. Now this may come from the tradition of Talmudaic disputation (much like the Jesuit tradition of acedemic excellence due to theological disputation). But I think it's more than that. Scholarship is admired in every Jewish tradition I'm aware of, be it the Kibutznik Socialist Atheist one, or the Ecstatic Ultra-Orthodox and Hassidic varieties.

The High School I went to had a large contingent of Jews - about 30% were absent during Jewish holidays. I spent many a happy hour at school in the Debating team (I was the token Goy), and in Germany, when I worked alongside a bunch of Israelis, I had a whale of a time discussing philosophy, religion, politics, science... Damn, I miss that.

And that's what brought me to the "Nature vs Nurture" bit. A kid who's got potential, yet not the somewhat abnormal ultra-curiousity of the compulsive learner will do best when put in such a Scholarship-admiring environment. The compulsive learner will do well in almost any circumstances, but even he (or she) will benefit, and certainly be a lot happier if it's not considered "weird" to want to stay up past midnight reading.

So there you have it - and possibly an insight into my somewhat rambling thought processes. It's not the number of neurons, it's the richness of the connections.

Ignore or Spin, that is the Question

Some readers may be aware that there was a large Demonstration against Terrorism in Iraq recently. But only if they've been getting the data from Primary Sources. People who actually took part, and took photos.
From FrontPage Magazine :

Almost 20,000 men and women - twice the number reported by al-Jazeera - marched across central Baghdad, while others repeated the move in different cities of Mesopotamia yesterday. The demonstrators, from all walks of life and from all religions and ethnicities of Iraq, shouted one slogan in Arabic: "La' la' lil irhab. Na'am, na'am lil dimucratiya." That is: "No, no to terrorism. Yes, yes to Democracy!"

The only papers to cover it took it from the KnightRidder Washington Bureau.

Five thousand to 10,000 Iraqis tried to send terrorists a cease-and-desist message Wednesday from downtown Baghdad in the biggest demonstration against violence to date

Even then, what they're saying isn't exactly what eyewitness bloggers who took part are reporting:

In Baghdad, the protesters snarled traffic by filling Fateh Square near the National Theater and Fardos Square in front of the Palestine Hotel. Chanting "No, no terrorism" and "Yes, yes Islam," they carried photographs of religious leaders and unfurled banners that read "The Iraqis Should Not Forget Palestine."
[...]
...not everyone was feeling peaceful. "What did Saddam do for us? He slaughtered us all. What did the Americans do for us? They slaughtered us all," said an angry woman in a head-to-toe black abaya.

The rest of mainstream Media is just pretending that it didn't happen.

Helping Daddy

Nearly 2-and-a-half, and already changing CDs on Daddy's computer...

Conan the Librarian

(From www.grudge-match.com)

The Norm has Moved

Normblog (by My Favourite Marxist) is now at http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/.

If you haven't bookmarked it already, you've missed out on some very cogent posts, from subjects such as the Morality of Forgiveness without Contrition, through to the Religion of Rugby, and how the Far Left has lost its way. (And more to the point, how it can get back to its Humanistic roots.). Jazz. Poetry. Humour. And most of all, Wit and Wisdom.

Turn of Phrase of the Week

From Transterrestrial Musings :

In addition, his numbers are simply pulled out of the air, or perhaps some danker, less sanitary location--I don't want to know...

Scum-Sucking Bottom-Feeders, and Incompetent Too

Much as I support The Gubernator (Arnold Schwartznegger), especially after the smear campaign against him, I have to say that at least one member of his staff needs firing.

From The Australian :

With her lawyer Gloria Allred by her side, Miller made the groping allegations in a news conference on October 7, the day before the California recall election.

Within hours, the Schwarzenegger campaign sent an email to several reporters directing them to the Los Angeles Superior Court website and instructing them to type in the name "Rhonda Miller".

That produced court records for a woman named Rhonda Miller with a long criminal record.

The email, sent by Schwarzenegger adviser Sean Walsh, said, "We have to believe that as a lawyer Gloria would have thoroughly checked the facts and background of the individual she presented at a news conference today."

Except of course that the Criminal "Rhonda Miller" on the site was a different person entirely. And the reaction of Governor Schwartnegger's Lawyer?

Schwarzenegger attorney Marty Singer denied that Walsh's email suggested Miller had a criminal record. The email "does not state specifically that this is the same woman who was making the claim the night before the election," Singer said.

Here in Australia, that "defence" would greatly increase the damages awarded. Only a hopelessly incompetent Lawyer would use it in Australia. Of course things may be different in California, and there is little doubt that Rhonda Miller's complaint was part of a carefully-orchestrated smear campaign by political opponents.

As for the title of the post? The old joke : "What's the difference between a Lawyer and a Catfish? One's a Scum-sucking bottom-feeder, the other's just a fish."

So Arnie, fire Sean Walsh, whose actions descended below the sewer your opponents were slithering in. Oh yes, and get a new Lawyer. A Competent one. If it comes to a Jury trial, after Marty Singer's remarks, you may need one.

The Unkindest Cut of All

Sticking knives into people is wrong.

It's always wrong.

There's never a case where cutting people with knives is or other blades is wholly right, moral, ethical or proper.

It always is accompanied by physical damage to the victim, damage which may never heal, and which historically has caused untold pain and suffering, be it via dagger, sword, guillotine or scalpel.

But... it can be the lesser of two evils.

Society accords a respected place to people who actually make their living out of carving people up, sometimes removing whole organs. We call them "surgeons".

We also have places for people who carve up others for fun, we call them "mass murderers" and shun them.

So the next time someone says "War is never justified", and that "Saddam could have been contained indefinitely", think about the role of Surgery in Medicine. Whether the diseased organ was infectious or not is still subject to controversy: but that the surgery relieved untold suffering is only deniable by the terminally reality-challenged. And by the doctors who were making a nice living out of the drugs they were giving the patient that actually increased the damage, the "Oil for Palaces" programme so dear to the hearts of Chirac and Putin.

Internet Mk2 enters Beta Testing?

From the Sydney Morning Herald comes some news full of omen and portent :

American scientists and researchers, frustrated that the internet's popularity has crowded them out and slowed serious research, are building their own new information superhighway.

The National LambdaRail system, described by some as the internet of the future, is an $US80 million ($108 million) fibre-optic network designed to do for science in cyberspace what motorways did for two-lane roads.

On this thoroughfare, speed will be measured in billions of bits a second and information will zip across the US on beams of light.

The first leg of National LambdaRail is a 1084-kilometre segment of optical fibre linking supercomputing centres in Chicago and Pittsburgh. It was brought online last month.

Over the next year, a consortium of technology companies and research universities will add 16,000 kilometres of fibre to create the largest and fastest scientific research network in the world.

The consortium says National LambdaRail will be available only to scientists. But the technology tools being developed for it will lay the foundation for future networks capable of "extreme multimedia" that could enable doctors to perform surgery a thousand kilometres away, permit high-definition videoconferencing and open a door to virtual reality gaming that could make today's internet look like a country back road.

LambdaRail reflects researchers' growing concern that the internet - with its 180 million connected computers, 40 million websites, and a growing number of hackers, crackers, spammers, worms and viruses - is no longer the kind of place to do serious science.

"The great success of the internet is its ubiquity and its shared nature," said Ron Hutchins, associate vice-provost of Georgia Tech and its chief technology officer.

"Unfortunately, the great downfall of the internet is also its ubiquity and shared nature."

Aye, there's the rub. But why do I say this is a Beta Test of Internet Mk 2? Because we've been here before.

Paul Barfield, a board member of National LambdaRail, said the system was also designed to help scientists and engineers go "back to the future" by creating the kind of free-thinking environment that, during the 1970s, laid the foundation for what would become the internet.

Many of the networking fundamentals that make possible the seamless flow of information on today's internet emerged from the tinkering that computer scientists did, out of the public eye, on ARPA net, a Pentagon-financed system that linked four computing centres.

In a world where society now depends on the internet as much as it relies on electrical power grids and pipelines, Georgia Tech's Mr Hutchins said scientists simply did not dare experiment with "the net" itself.

"What we need," he said, "is a place where we can crash and burn without bringing down the whole system."

But unless they've got new protocols that mean you can trust the sender's address, the same SPAM problems that SPAM bedevil the SPAM Internet SPAM now SPAM will SPAM SPAM occur SPAM SPAM SPAM in SPAM SPAM future SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM.

When good Wallaroos turn Bad

From The Australian :

A 67-year-old woman had to fight for her life after being attacked by an angry wallaroo at her home in southern Queensland.
[...]
Believing him to be thirsty, she brought him a bucket of water.

"He looked at it and just came at me with his claws," Mrs Sinton told National Nine news.
[...]
The animal grabbed Mrs Sinton around the neck, kicking, scratching and headbutting her as she reached for a shovel to fend him off.

"I really gave him hard hits on the head," she said.

The old shovel then fell apart and the wallaroo turned on Zac, Mrs Sinton's cattle dog.

She ran for her car, with the roo following her, and managed to phone her husband who grabbed a rifle.

The roo tried to wrestle the firearm away from him.

"He grabbed the barrel," Mrs Sinton said.
[...]
Mr Sinton finally managed to shoot the rogue wallaroo but not before his wife had suffered numerous cuts and bruises to her arms and body.

Mr PIcasso Head

Via the Volokh Conspiracy by way of TexasBestGrok, here is Mr PIcassohead

Rational Marxism

For how long have Marxists been saying things like this ?

The US administration and the other governments in the coalition, with their customary cynicism, exploited that goal, and the issue of weapons of mass destruction, to promote their shared vision of an international order that is safer for capitalism, implying, among other things, more liberal democracies, with more compliant governments; more "free" trade, in oil as in other commodities; and more effective joint action against terrorism. There is every reason to think that they are insincere about much of this programme, and that their definitions of such terms as "democracy" or "terrorism" differ from ours. There is no reason, however, to think that they are insincere about all of it ; the western "left" has no monopoly on self-deluding idealism ; and it makes more sense to assess each scene in this continuing drama on its own merits, by the light of the doctrine of the lesser evil, than to either buy into the whole deal or reject it out of hand simply because it isn't revolutionary socialism. Given the widespread popularity of capitalism and the vanishingly small support for socialism in the contemporary world, it would be stupid to expect anything more radical. On the other hand, as long as we are to be ruled by capitalist states, which would you rather be ruled by: a coalition of liberal democracies that pay at least lipservice to free speech, or any number of ruthless genocidal dictatorships that want to revive the worst aspects of the Middle Ages (and we don't mean folk songs or William Morris wallpapers)?

It could just as easily have said something like :

There is every reason to think that Marxists are insincere about much of this programme, and that their definitions of such terms as "democracy" or "terrorism" differ from ours. There is no reason, however, to think that they are insincere about all of it ; the western "Right" has no monopoly on self-deluding idealism ; and it makes more sense to assess each scene in this continuing drama on its own merits, by the light of the doctrine of the lesser evil, than to either buy into the whole deal or reject it out of hand simply because it isn't Free-Market Capitalism.

There are about a million things wrong with unrestrained Capitalism. You can easily miss many of them, but just a few weeks work providing "Meals on Wheels" or similar voluntary community service will thrust them right in your face. Yes, Laissez-Faire Capitalism may be - in fact from the evidence it is - the best way of providing personal freedom and greater economic benefits overall, but there are always exceptions, people who "fall through the cracks" and don't benefit from the greater wealth, and may even go backwards. And Monopolists who deliberately use the Free Market's mechanisms to make it less Free.

I've always thought that there were rather more than a Million things wrong with Marxism. The whole "Labour Theory of Value" is a self-evident crock, and for every rabid Capitalist Carnegie there was a Brezhnev, or Pol Pot. The difference between a scalded finger and being cut in half with a chainsaw. (Note : Scalded Fingers are Bad, I'm not saying they're good, just not comparable with bisection.). The Tancte de Sangria - the Taint of Blood - that prevented the East German Children of University graduates (unless they were Party Members) from being admitted to Uinversities so as to destroy the Bourguoisie reminded me of similar exclusions of those of non-Aristocratic Stock from the corridors of power, back in the 17th century and earlier.

But it appears that Gulags, Repression, and the Nomenklatura are no more an indivisible part of Marxism than Sweatshops and Ruthless Exploitation are indivisible from Capitalism. They're diseases that the philosophies are prone to, but only tendencies, not predestined certainties. And it appears that although I still differ, and differ radically, from the writers of the quoted article on the question of means, we are very close indeed when it comes to ends. Norman Geras isn't the only Rational Marxist.

New Labor in Australia

Most of this blog's readership is outside Australia, and probably knows even less about Australian politics than I do about the US or UK political scene. Who's the leader of the UK Conservatives? No idea, but at least it's not someone with a double-barrel name any more. What are the major political parties in the UK? Labour, Conservative, and .... Democrats? Social Democrats? Is there still a Liberal Party (under that name) stubbornly refusing to die? There's bound to be some Greens.

As for the US, the Democratic contenders are... Dean (who will get the job), Kerry, and the always-amusing-but-seriously-loopy Kucinich. And some others.

I've already posted a potted summary of Australian Political parties, so go read that to learn about the Dramatis Personae.

Recently - as in, the day-before-yesterday, the ALP (the party in Opposition) changed its leadership. Mark Latham won in a <sarcasm>landslide</sarcasm>, 47 to 45. Now what type of man is he? Well, there's an article in the Herald-Sun that will make interesting reading, especially to non-Australians. Some choice quotes:

I'd been appalled when he'd boasted of breaking the arm of a taxi driver in a brawl over a fare, and when he jeered former Liberal Tony Staley, who needs crutches to walk, as "deformed in every sense".
[...]
So I ignored Latham, and chatted instead with Geoff Clark, the Aboriginal leader.

But within minutes, one of Latham's drinking mates peeled off and plonked himself in my face, screaming obscenities for at least 10 minutes and plucking at my arm, clearly spoiling for a fight he didn't dare start.

It was Steve Roach, a Labor identity and CFMEU union official, and I ordered him out of the pub.

I later asked Latham whether he'd sent Roach over to me, but he refused to answer - though he later told Parliament he hadn't, then added I was a "nancy boy", anyway.
[...]
"I'm a hater," the man yesterday voted Labor's new leader brazenly told the Bulletin only last month.

And so he is. He's told how he teaches his sons to "hate" Liberals. He's also set them the example by using Parliament to attack a female journalist as a "skanky ho", or filthy whore.

He's branded another media critic as a "fair dinkum nutter", and yet another as a "drug addict".

HE'S even denounced civility as a conspiracy against poor people, and praised parents who were "having a go at the ref, yelling abuse" at their children's games as "the good parents, the ones who care".
[...]
All this is not just a bit of colour and movement, good for a laugh or a look-at-me headline, and of no political consequence.

On the contrary, that hate has affected his political judgment, to disastrous effect for Labor, if not for Latham personally.

He has gone on to call Prime Minister John Howard an "arse-licker" and the Liberals a "conga line of suckholes", and in February, excited by the cheers of Labor's anti-American Left, labelled US President George Bush "flaky" and "the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory".

His extravagant abuse of Bush, by the way, came in a speech on Iraq during which he failed criticise Saddam Hussein.

Australians love a Larrikin - even one to whom it's all a political act. But we despise bullies and thugs. I'm personally willing to suspend judgement until I see more of the man, but odds are that Bob Carr ( Premier of NSW and arguably the most successful Labor politician in the country ) was right when he said just a few days ago:

"Mark Latham as leader of the federal Labor Party? That would be a diverting nine months."

Carceri et Dracones

Truly there is Nothing New Under the Sun.
(Carceri et Dracones is 'Dungeons and Dragons' in Latin, IIRC.)

The picture is of an Icosahedral die made of glass, dated to the 2nd century AD, used to play a Roman Game of unknown characteristics.

But then again, we live in a world of rapid change (so much so that it's a cliche). But who would have thought, even 10 years ago, that they'd be selling DNA Sequencers as Kids toys?

Another Blow for Japan.

Some musings on reliability, and Disposable vs Re-Usable boosters.

After 5 consecutive flawless launches of the Japanese H2A launcher, a failed strap-on booster coupling meant a flight had to be destroyed.

Bugger.

Rand Simberg says:

No matter how vaunted your quality control, and technological prowess, it is simply not possible to reliably or affordably build vehicles for which each flight is a first flight and a last, particularly when you build so few.

Or as we say here, "Sh1t Happens".

I'm not sure that he's wrong, but in all other similar human activities, such as Drag Racing, where the last 5% of performance is crucial, most of the vehicle has to be replaced with new parts after each run.

Meanwhile, the always-readable Rocket Man reveals what he's been working on, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. He also name-drops shamelessly:

As I have said before, I sometimes forget that the projects I work on are not that well known to the general public. I have worked on Cassini, Mars Pathfinder, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Polar Lander, Mars Climate Orbiter, Stardust, Genesis and other spacecraft, and after a while it sort of becomes routine to work on them. However, I am always surprised when I tell people what I do for a living and they are actually interested in hearing about it.

Sure you are.... :-)

One of my sayings is that most jobs are 90% routine and 10% interesting. My job is no different in that I spend a lot of time working on a CAD system, doing drawings, ordering parts, supervision fabrication, going to meetings, etc. But my 10% is generally much more interesting than most peoples 10%.

Having seen the amount of skull-sweat involved in the mechanical engineering of FedSat, the extreme pains that were taken to keep the CAD model in lockstep with the actual hardware and the myriad minor design changes necessitated during development, I can say that his modesty knows no bounds. While I was frantically scribbling away on the whiteboard brainstorming how to get that ferschlugginer potrzebie of a mass memory unit to work within very tight time constraints, the mech eng guys had to completely re-design the baseplate to gain a vital 3 cm of additional clearance due to a late-changing physical requirement. His saying reminds me of the song's lyrics:

And all the Science
I don't Understand.
It's just a Job, 5 days a week.

Sure it is... And like me, he may not understand all the Science, but he sure understands the Engineering. The Rocket Man also has a gift for understatement that would do a Pom proud.

Building a spacecraft that can make it all the way to Mars and successful complete its mission is not easy.

I can believe that.

I have never worked on an Earth orbiting satellite,

<humour>Not that he looks down his nose at us poor peons who have only worked on one itsy-bitsy satellite in Low Earth Orbit not even 1000 km high... </humour>

...but I do know that the Earth's magnetic field offers some protection from the Suns radiation as they orbit the Earth. Mars does not have the same protective magnetic field as Earth, so from the time they leave Earth orbit, Mars spacecraft are subjected to the unfiltered effects of the Suns radiation. This radiation is very hard on the electronics aboard the spacecraft and great efforts are required to make sure they will work properly during the mission.. Mars does not have the same protective magnetic field as Earth, so from the time they leave Earth orbit, Mars spacecraft are subjected to the unfiltered effects of the Suns radiation. This radiation is very hard on the electronics aboard the spacecraft and great efforts are required to make sure they will work properly during the mission.

Beneath the Van Allen Belts, Orbits are, as he says, protected against much of Dat Ol Debbil Radiation. Alas, the Van Allen Belts themselves protect the Earth by "trapping" a lot of the charged particles within them, they're far worse for Rad Hazard than open space (except during a solar flare). And in the South Atlantic Anomaly, the belts dip to 200 km altitude, which means that Polar Orbital (ie North-to-South) satellites in LEO (Low Earth Orbit) get toasted on at least two passes every 24 hours, plus a lesser toasting over each of the poles every 50 minutes.
But that's just minor detail, his main point is sound: that the Radiation dose that spacecraft get when the journey interplanetary distances means that they must be extremely Rad-hardened. Those going near Jupiter must have even more protection, and 7x redundancy or better to survive the radiation maelstrom there.

Anyway, please go read the whole thing.. He describes the infinite care and patience in testing required to have a chance of successful mission completion. Nothing can guarantee success, but skimping on any one of the myriad steps is guaranteed to cause a disaster, sooner or later.

... the next time you hear about a spacecraft that successfully completes its mission to Mars you will hopefully have a better appreciation of just what it took to accomplish that feat.

Abso-freaking-lutely. Bon Voyage, MRO, you're in good hands.

China Shoots the Moon

From a post on Cumudgeon's Corner come this article from the Toronto Star :

China plans to land a human on the moon by 2020, the country's chief space official said in comments broadcast today by state television.

"By 2020, we will achieve visiting the moon," said Luan Enjie, director of the National Aerospace Bureau. Luan used a verb that specifically describes a human act.

Luan said that would follow the launch of a probe to orbit the moon by 2007 and an unmanned lunar landing by 2010.

As I've said previously, the devil's in the details. It sounds as if they're accelerating the pace, with Phase 3 involving crewed vehicles. From my previous post on October 17:

Phase 1, by 2005: Lunar flyby or orbiting satellite missions, perhaps using the DFH-3 bus.
Phase 2, by 2010: unmanned soft-landing missions.
Phase 3, by 2020: Robotic exploration using surface rovers.
Phase 4, by 2030: Lunar sample return missions.
Only after 2030 would manned flights and construction of a lunar base begin.

New York Times admits their Iraqi casualty count "exagerrated by a factor of 10"

Nothing new.

Happy Thanksgiving

As about 30% of my readers are American, just thought I'd wish you all a happy Thanksgiving.

In Australia, we have something to be thankful for too - Mr '16%' Simon Crean, the leader of the Australian Labor Party (sorta like the left wing of the US Democrats) has resigned, fallen on his sword, turned up his political toes and gone to join the political Choir Invisibule.

Of the three major contenders, one's a Show Pony (good at media manipulation, but shallow as a Petri Dish), one's a savage Leftist Party Hack, and one's a really good second-in-command but a hopelessly inept leader. At least he was last time he led the party. In a (Hypothetical) National Coalition Government though, I'd want him as Minister for Defence.

As a Liberal voter, I should be overjoyed at the disarray of the Opposition. But as an Australian, it worries me. A healthy Democracy requires a healthy Opposition, not one that's schizoid and riven with factions. God help us all if they get into government the way they are. I'd really like a choice of who to vote for, Good vs Better, not Good-to-Adequate vs Utterly Hopeless.

Still, there are people like this in the "second Row" of the ALP front bench. Even though I fought against the AUS (Australian Union of Students) and all it stood for at the time she was a rising star in that august organisation, she's done a pretty good job as shadow minister for Health. There is some talent in the ALP - it's just that the factional politics makes sure that only mediocrities and political gamesplayers make it to the forefront.

A Map of the Internet

From Opte comes this work of art - a colour-coded map of the internet's main structure.

Asia Pacific - Red
Europe/Middle East/Central Asia/Africa - Green
North America - Blue
Latin American and Caribbean - Yellow
RFC1918 IP Addresses - Cyan
Unknown - White

Who Stole Vaverchek's Brain?

This adventure, and much more, available at Steve Conley's Astounding Space Thrills ( an on-line comic).

Indomitable Courage

Warning : one of the links is to material that is nightmarish. Parental disgression advised.

"...flesh is stronger than steel
because it can shape or break it, but the soul is strongest of all because it is master of the flesh."
- Conan the Mighty, William Galen Gray

Now screw up your own courage (you'll need it), and look at the story of Jacqueline Saburido, a victim of Drunk Driving by others.

The graphic reality that needed the warning is here.

Oh yes, she was uninsured, and you can help pay her medical bills with a small donation. I have. (Bona Fides checked via Snopes)

Weird Wide Web

Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow

From Scene 1 of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail":

SOLDIER #1: Listen. In order to maintain air-speed velocity, a swallow needs to beat its wings forty-three times every second, right?
ARTHUR: Please!
SOLDIER #1 : Am I right?

Nope, it's about 15 beats a second at cruise, according to the article. ( Found via Utterly Boring. I told you in the link opposite that it isn't.)

Recent Searches

One of the things that fascinate me is how people find this blog, and the search strings they've entered to get here.

Some recent examples, with the ranking of my blog in the search results.:

• ribbentrop-molotov avalon project (No 6)
• taxiing in fog (No 3)
• why we remember Zheng He (No 3)
• software development "tree swing" (No 3)
• the brain (No 170!!)
• useless facts on the brain (No 6)
• "dikij vostok" film (No 9)
• us rolling the space programme (No 9)
• superglue korean soldiers (No 6)
• Farry trips in Latvia (No 1)
• ss athenia picture (No 1)
• armour II firewall (No 35)
• carmel gravy recipes kosher (Unknown)
• picture of cartoon brain head (No 13)
• a e brain (No 1)
• pauline hanson fish and chips images (No 11)
• brain operation forms (No 8)

Puzzling questions: why has Google stopped ranking me in "carmel gravy recipes kosher"? And what was the purpose of the mysterious query about "superglue korean soldier"?

The world continues to puzzle, amaze and delight me. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

A Cultural Treasury

Sometimes while surfing the net, looking for useful things, one serendipidously finds something completely useless that was long looked-for, but never found.

On a plain, unadorned site with the cryptic name SCBD, there's not one, nor two, nor even three such, but more.

First, the Top of the Flops : lyrics of the very worst songs of recent times, for example, the Chicken Song:

Hold a chicken in the air, stick a deckchair up your nose,
Buy a jumbo jet and then bury all your clothes,
Paint your left knee green, then extract your wisdom teeth,
Form a string quartet and pretend your name is Keith.

Skin yourself alive, learn to speak Arapaho,
Climb inside a dog and behead an Eskimo,
Eat a Renault 4, wear salami in your ears,
Casserole your gran, disembowel yourself with spears

Ah, they don't make songs like that any more. For which we can all be grateful. There's also old perennials like "It Was An Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini" and modern Classics like "Green Grow My Nadgers Oh". And my favourite of all time, "Right Said Fred", whose lyrics I've been chasing since I first heard it in the early 60's.

Then there's the Stanley Unwin transcripts. Now who is Stanley Unwin, you may well ask. I didn't know either till I saw this site. But you may recognise his work, as I did:

...There was a great suffery. Not only this: the larder, foodage, all the fine things of the world was not enjoying by the peopload themselves on account of these rats doing a sniffy most (and the chew-chew and stuffle down their ratty grebes); because these were the fattest raps and also over-producey in this great lovely city which was otherwise... tsk tsk.

Then there's the Prisoner Transcripts.

Prisoner: I am not a number, I am a person.
Number 2: Six of one, a half a dozen of another!

And then there's a serious but eminently readable guide to the Greek Alphabet.

This is an intellectual smorgasbord, condimented with comedy, but salted with the surreal, sinister and serious.

A Blast from the Past

Before March this year, I had a conversation with a good friend of mine, whose views are rather to the Left of my own, discussing Iraq and World War II. He was unable to see why the Pacifists and Anti-War movement in 1938 were so strong, or how anyone with 2 neurons to fire together could have been anything other than emphatically for a War to oust Hitler, the sooner, the better.

I on the other hand, was viewing all the arguments against involvement in Iraq, and showing that not merely did they have some justification, but that the same justification was also true in 1938. Yes, we certainly should have acted far sooner than we did then, but the matter was nowhere near as clear-cut as it looks 60+ years later. I've learnt more sympathy for the 1938 pacifists than I had ten years ago by living in similar times, and having to face similar unpleasant choices. I can now understand them, while not condoning their actions nor agreeing with them in the smallest iota.

My Leftist friend was - and still is - against the Iraqi war, while still condemning the people who were anti-war in 1938. I still believe most fervently that our only mistake in Iraq was not going in sooner, but am willing to grant that people of good will who disagree with me do so out of good intent, not stupidity or malice. At least, not always, and certainly not the majority.

With that in mind, please have a look at a recent article of mine on The Command Post, suggesting a suitable poster for the "Not In My Name" bunch to march behind. The people protesting against George Bush and Amerikkka are not Nazis - they just believe in many of the same things. Perhaps if the similarities between recent events and those of 60+ years ago are brought to their attention often enough, the penny may drop. Though I'm beginning to doubt it - people do not like facing up to the consequences of their actions, nor will they thank you for revealing unpleasant truths. And that applies to both sides of this debate.

(Clipping courtesy of The CounterRevolutionary blog)

Rocket Science

Rocket Man has a remarkable article on the testing involved in making a booster - in this case, the Atlas-V.

The amount of engineering that goes into designing, building and testing a rocket is staggering. Since the cost of failure is so high, almost every part on a rocket is subjected to at least some testing before it is flown. The very first time a new design is going to be flown on a rocket, it is put through extensive testing that tries to simulate the exact loading it will see during flight. But even after a part has been flight certified, subsequent parts are still tested to verify that they were built properly.

The whole article's worth reading - then consider that these are single-use devices, all they have to do is work once, and that's it. It's OK for it to wear out quickly. Making stuff that can be re-used repeatedly is much harder, and requires even more outrageous design effort.

Space Software is comparatively easy: it can be run on simulators and repeatedly tested without wear-and-tear. But it has to run on hardware that's subject to all the stresses imposed by Vacuum, Radiation, and massive Thermal differences, due to being exposed to an unshielded fusion reactor, then plunged into deepest shadow, sometimes once every 100 minutes or so. And it's got to work, regardless of any minor problems with the hardware.

Consider how reliable your PC is, the one you're reading this on. Now, especially if you're a Windows user, consider how horribly unreliable the software is. It's possible to write code that won't crash (or even hiccup) for days, weeks, months and years. So why doesn't everyone do it?

Now you know why I, and "we happy few" people involved in making programs to control air traffic, railways, weapons systems and the like are engaged in doing Don Quixote impressions when it comes to Software Quality for the commercial world. Some of us are Australian, others English, others Swedish, American, German, French, Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese... In many cases our techniques are not just better, they're cheaper and faster too. They have to be, or, given the insanely exacting requirements, nothing would ever get delivered.

Life Cycle of a Project

There's been an old black-and-white cartoon of a tree swing that's been around for decades. According to one source, (presentation in pdf - see page 29) the original is pre-1970, and that's in accordance with my own recollection. According to another it is reputed to have been "First (?) seen in University of London Computer Centre Newsletter". There are many variants of the original.

But now someone's updated it in colour. Found while exploring Christoph Cemper's weblog.cemper.com.

Letter from a Marine Recruit

From Cynical Cyn, via G'day Mate comes a hilarious letter from a Marine Recruit from the sticks.

This next will kill Walt and Elmer with laughing. I keep getting medals for shooting. I don't know why. The bulls-eye is near as big as a chipmunk head and don't move. And it ain't shooting at you, like the Higgett boys at home. All you got to do is lie there all comfortable and hit it. You don't even load your own cartridges. They come in little metal boxes.

But the funniest thing is the punchline, which I won't spoil. For a good chuckle (or even a loud guffaw) please go read it

A Tip for those Interested in Designing Spacecraft

There's a link to the left called Spacecraft Design. It's Dr Christopher D.Hall's blog, which apart from imparting words of wit and wisdom about matters political, social, and general, also contains much of worth and merit re spacecraft design.

It should. He runs a course in it. One I wish I was in the right continent to take, or at least audit.

Chinese Space Programme Article

Mark Whittington has produced an excellent analysis of the Chinese Space Programme. He may be right, he may be wrong, but I agree with him.

Latest on Fedsat

In the news:
Little Aussie Battler Defies Space Storm

Fedsat is now the longest-lasting satellite built in Australia and the first in the world to demonstrate self-healing computers that repair themselves after being damaged by radiation.

The recent Solar Storms have been just exactly what we would have wished for, in order to get the very best data.

It is one of the most complex satellites of its size ever built and the first microsatellite to operate communications in the Ka-band of the radio spectrum.

Which will mean nothing to most people, but let's just say that it may allow broadband Internet connectivity on city streets without hunting for "Hotspots" and the like. It's a first step anyway, a proof-of-principle.

The best news in the report is that they've been given another $2.75 million to keep it operational till 2005. Without an injection of funds, we would have had a satellite, but no-one listening to it. Which would have been a shame. As it is, they might need to ask for more come 2005, it looks like exceeding its design lifetime by quite a bit. In the words of the classics, "Verily, I Gloat.".

The Fedsat Site (Warning : HUGE picture) has more on the code upload I reported on earlier

Fedsat has now been operating for almost 12 months and recently underwent a "maintenance service". This health check occurred over a 4 week period during September and October 2003. CRCSS staff are pleased with the results of the exercise and look forward to continuing the successful operation of the satellite. For example, some degradation had recently been noticed in a direction sensor. This was causing occasional minor wobbles in the satellite - the problem has now been bypassed by changing the control algorithm which uses that sensor. During the 4 week upgrade several "code patches" were sent to the FedSat computer to address this, and other, issues. Another excellent outcome was that new program code was successfully uploaded to the communications payload for the first time.

That probably means they've had to modify the program in the ACS (Attitude Control System). Full marks to the people at Dynacon in Canada (who made it) for doing their bit (consuming the new code that was stored and relayed to them by one of the modules I programmed). That's a neat little ACS for microsats they have there. Well-behaved. Reliable. Plays nice. Easy to fix if something goes wrong.

And it appears we've received some sort of award while my attention was averted elsewhere.

The Engineer has some nice things to say about the HPCE (High Performance Computing Experiment), just one of the payloads on board.

But the news is not all good: unlike the tiny, 50 Kilo Fedsat, which is about the size of a TV-set, the Winnebago-sized multitonne ADEOS-II that was launched with it as the primary payload has been abandoned as a total loss after only 10 months of service.

Well, I'm back.

After an examination so grueling it was positively Olivertwistian, I've finally finished the last test of the last module of my Master's of Information Technology. There was a question worth 2 marks out of 100 that I didn't have the complete answer for - an obscure one about format of a data log entry on a website - but I was able to make a decent attempt at the rest. Unlikely to get 10/10, but unlikely to get much below 6 either. It was certainly the hardest, but also one of the three most interesting courses I took at Charles Sturt University. Only one of the 8 modules was a dud, where I felt I'd done my dough. Four of them were good, workmanlike courses, well worth at least double what I paid for them, and three were outstanding.

BTW I've never actually been on any of the campusses (shouldn't that be Campi?) - this was all done via the internet, and correspondence. They give this course outside Australia as well as inside.

Oh, the sign on the right? Too good to be true, I'm afraid (though it paraphrases an exchange in the battle between St Barnabas and the Pub which I used to enjoy looking at every morning on my way to Uni in the 70's)

No, it's from the Church Sign Generator.

Inhuman Resources

I really should be studying for my exam (25 hours and 27 minutes to go, but who's counting). But for the last fortnight I've been utterly submerged in a task, no time to read anything, no time to watch TV, no time to blog, and worse, no time to surf the net and read other bloggers.
So while taking 10 minute breaks, I've been catching up on things. And on Silent Running, this story caught my eye.

On Sunday, Sept 28, I worked my shift as usual. The next morning, I was phoned at home by the boss, whom I shall call Mr A. He said: "Zenab, the sound of the World Service is changing, and you are not going to be a part of it. We won't be using you any more as an announcer."

"So - yesterday was my last day with Presentation? After three years of continuous work with you, that's it?" I asked, after a few seconds.

"Yes. Your voice is too clipped."

More stunned silence. Then finally: "But, six months ago, the senior announcer who ran my top-up training said you had personally selected me as part of the new sound. What's changed?"

"There's nothing else to say." Mr A put down the phone.

How not to do things. If there's a problem, the person concerned should be made aware of it, and whatever training or other corrective action required should be provided. Sometimes people don't work out in a job. Sometimes it's their own fault, sometimes it isn't. But it's only common human decency to let them know if there's a problem, and help them make every effort to correct it. You don't just suddenly fire them giving a flimsy and incomprehensible excuse...unless there's dirty work at the crossroads.

I had not been given even a hint that I was heading for the chop during my time at Bush House, the World Service HQ. In fact, the opposite: the announcer who gave me refresher training said I was seen to have promise.

Black newsroom colleagues told me how great it was to hear an Asian name on air. It showed that the World Service was moving away from its white, middle-class image, they said.

The Presentation people invested six months in bringing me up to the required standard and put me on air for almost three years. Then they took me off for sounding "clipped", which I take to be a euphemism for well-spoken. And it was only after my protests that I got severance pay to cover loss of earnings.

A dead giveaway, that last. This was personal.

The speed at which it all happened was breath-taking. I felt as if I was being treated like a security risk. Human resources immediately closed down my computer account, though I used the same log-in for work elsewhere in the BBC.

Another dead giveaway. This was planned by some Stalinist (method not politics) clique a long time ago, and the trap sprung. A similar thing almost happened to me once, I got out at about the third sign of it, probably a few weeks before the action was going to be taken. Others in that organisation haven't been so lucky since, so I've been informed. The section was closed down soon after they got rid of the last competent employee left.

Later that day, when I rang Mr A, (who is a "Mockney", incidentally), he told me I was not being given notice in case I "did a Dave Lee Travis". Seemingly, he was referring to the former Radio 1 DJ's anti-BBC rant on air the day he was dismissed.

So, apparently, I was too posh and a potential loose cannon to boot.

He told me he was looking for a warmer, richer sound. I was tempted to say that, as a single mother bringing up two children on my own, partly on state benefit, I cannot claim to be rich.

And as for warm - well, I started off that way but the BBC trained me to sound more authoritative.

The Director General, Greg Dyke, wants more people of colour working for the BBC. But perhaps I wasn't black enough; perhaps I needed to sound more Pakistani.

During the continuity shifts I did at Bush House, I used to read out an intro to "Write On", which features listeners' comments on the output.

Their letters often complained that they could not decipher the regional accents of some announcers. Not all that surprising, as for most World Service listeners, English is their second language.

However, I was frequently complimented on the distinctive clarity of my voice.

I can second that. The presenter - or rather, ex-presenter in question has a perfectly serviceable voice for world broadcasting. English, but not so coloured by local dielect that it's incomprehensible to foreigners (unlike some).

Finally, the clincher :

? The BBC said last night that its decision to cease employing Ms Ahmed "had nothing to do with her accent", adding: "The BBC aims to use as wide a range of voices on air as possible - including accents some may regard as 'posh'.

"We have invested a lot of time and effort in developing Ms Ahmed's skills. We regularly review announcers' abilities and performance and we retain those who meet our standards. We're sorry it didn't work out as we would have wished for all parties."

100% Pure, unadulterated Bullshit. It's not often i use scatology, but in this case, it's appropriate. Tried, Sentenced and Executed. But what was her crime? As far as I know, she's not Jewish - the usual victims of this kind of Kangaroo Court. Probably just office politics.

Memo to the BBC: Fire your Human resources people for gross incompetence and reckless disregard for human decency. Or someone one day will sue you for a fortune, and win. Oh yes, and as for the people who planned and executed this dirty piece of work, take the money out of their pay packets by sueing them in turn. They understand Fear, they use it every day as a tool to keep their lickspittles in line. So put some Fear into them, in the name of Justice.

Sorry, this one struck a personal chord in me. But I think such behaviour should be discouraged whenever it's found. Because it's a remarkably short step from this type of behaviour to sending people into the Gulags. The same mentality at work.

Talking about work, time I got back to it.

Normal Blogging Resumes on the 19th November

As to why posts have been nonexistant, let me just say:

It's not the 17-hour days that get you, it's the 120-hour weeks and 250-hour fortnights...

The Slashdot Effect

I work for a mob called Software Improvements.

On Monday, Salon wrote a rather complimentary article on our eVACS® electronic voting system, an article that was then picked up by Slashdot.

We got hit by the Slashdot Effect, which in our case amounted to 33,000 hits in a few hours. Fortunately, our ISP's server coped. It appears that we got more hits in the last 2 days than in the previous 2 years.

Normal Service will be resumed Shortly

I've got a hefty assignment to complete by the 15th, and an exam on the 18th to study for, then there's work, and my 2-year-old son, Andrew... so blogging will be very intermittent for the next 2 weeks.

But in the meantime, courtesy of Steve Jackson's Daily Illuminator, there's the Octodog. $16.95 plus postage.

From Samizdata.net there's Smallpox: A Musical, with the unforgettable refrain

The Halls are Awash, with the sound of Mucus"...

And from Jihad Watch, via LGF, the Pakistan Christian Post publishes an open letter from the "Grand Prior" of the Knights Templar to one Osama Bin Laden, challenging him to single combat.

We doubt that you really believe there are any Crusaders left, as we doubt that you really believe in God. You would not taunt Crusaders if you really believed in them, because you are a craven coward who cherishes his own flesh while admonishing your followers to blow themselves up. You are an infidel, because no one who truly believes in God would sanction the killing of innocent men, women, and children. Your actions show you to be both a coward and an infidel, because you ask your followers to do what you are afraid to do, and you don't believe there is a God who will condemn you for your vile actions against Islam and humanity.
[...]
.... to prove to the entire world that you are a coward and an infidel, this Knight Templar challenges you to single combat in the sands of Pakistan. I challenge you to meet me with scimitar or sword, to be pitted against myself and a holy sword consecrated to our Order-a sword that was forged to destroy evil.

If the Grand Prior is a member of the SCA, I'd lay 2:1 odds on him. 20:1 if armour and shield are allowed.

Weathering the Storm

Back in 2001, I had the pleasure to head the On-Board Software development team for FedSat, Australia's first Satellite for 30 years. The recent Solar Storms have caused all sorts of problems for many satellites, but FedSat is still humming along. In the days before the storms hit, a patched version of the software was uploaded to the satellite, ending in pass 4574 or thereabouts, when over a megabyte of data was transmitted to FedSat. Quite a bit more had been transmitted in the immediately previous passes. This corrected a minor problem with the transmission of program data to the Communications payload, and enabled the ground crew to successfully upload a new version of the software for the Comms payload experiment (theres quite a few separate computers on board, each prgrammable independently). I don't know what the problem was, but as the code upload worked perfectly for the other payloads, I suspect it was some duff parameters to do with where in the Comms payload's memory the data was supposed to be put.

Anyway, you can see a summary of the lastest data from Fedsat on the web. Battery voltage is still pretty good after nearly a year in orbit, better than expectations. You can see where the voltage drops due to the high power drain when communicating with the ground station. Our goal was 12 months of full functionality, another 2 years of almost-complete functionality, then maybe another 2 years of partial functionality. It looks as if we may get quite a bit longer.

I had an e-mail interview with a Journalist at the Age newspaper, and he did superb job of condensing my ramblings (and others) into a neat, tidy article. Here's a quote:

Only 58 centimetres square and weighing 50 kilograms, the tiny FedSat satellite is packed with five scientific experiments and all of the instruments required to communicate with Earth during its anticipated three-year life. At the heart of the satellite is a 10MHz ERC-32 processor - a SPARC-based 32-bit RISC processor developed for high-reliability space applications.

The ERC-32 sacrifices processing power for durability and reliability. It uses three chips to process a modest 10 million instructions per second and two million floating-point operations per second - less than 1 per cent of a Pentium 4's capabilities.

The pay-off is reliability: the ERC-32 uses concurrent error-detection to correct more than 95 per cent of errors.

Power-hungry microprocessors such as the Pentium 4, which runs a standard office PC bought off the shelf today, would be an intolerable burden on the solar-powered satellite. The ERC-32 consumes less than 2.25 watts at 5.5 volts.

Designed to survive extreme radiation bursts from solar flares, the ERC-32 can tolerate radiation doses up to 50,000 rad. This is 100 times the lethal dose for humans.

Low-Earth-orbit is "a cruel place to put a computer", says software engineer Alan Brain, who is responsible for FedSat's data-handling system.

It will orbit at about 803 kilometres above the Earth's surface and will circle the planet every 100 minutes.

"The radiation will cause random bit-flips and can even fry components," Brain says. "The vacuum boils the volatile gasses out of normal chips, making them useless and coating everything nearby with conductive gunk. In the Earth's shadow, temperatures make Antarctica look balmy, and in the sun's glare it's hotter than the Simpson Desert. On the way up, the vibration of the rocket would shake most normal circuit boards to pieces."

Spaceflight avionics software development is not for the faint-hearted either.

"The question for software developers is not, 'Are you paranoid?', the question is, 'Are you paranoid enough?' " Brain says. "Every software module, every function, procedure or method has to assume that information coming in may have been spoilt by a malfunction and be prepared for the worst. The system must be ductile - bending, not breaking - when things go wrong. In space no one can press Control/Alt/Delete."

A team of Australian programmers developed FedSat's onboard software, building on work done in Britain. It is written in Ada-95, a programming language designed for embedded systems and safety-critical software. All it has to work with is 16MB of RAM, 2MB of flash memory for storing the program, a 128K boot PROM (programmable read only memory) and 320MB of DRAM in place of a hard disk that would never survive the launch process. All essential data is stored in three physically different locations.

Along with controlling the satellite, this software must interface with the satellite's five experimental payloads. These are designed to study UHF and Ka-band transmission characteristics and coding methods, the Earth's magnetic field, Global Positioning System applications, high-performance computing and the stars.

Along with power restrictions, the main constraint on FedSat's designers is its limited contact with Earth.

The FedSat ground station will control the satellite via an S-Band bidirectional radio link using a dish on the roof of the Signal Processing Research Institute building at the University of South Australia's Mawson Lakes campus.

Owing to FedSat's orbit, the ground station will only be able to communicate with the satellite during two 20-minute periods each day.

As such, a large component of the software's work is logging data to be downloaded and storing commands to be executed while the satellite is out of contact.

Pretty Cruel is right. As John Hohl told the BBC :

Commenting on the solar events of the past few days John Kohl of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the US, said: "It's like the Earth is looking right down the barrel of a giant gun pointed at us by the Sun...and it's taken two big shots at us."

"The Sun is really churned up. The timing of two very large X-class flares aimed directly at the Earth, occurring one right after another, is unprecedented.

"I have not seen anything like it in my entire career as a solar physicist. The probability of this happening is so low that it is a statistical anomaly."

And as I said, "The Question is not 'Are you paranoid?' but 'Are you paranoid enough?'. <gloat>I beefed up the memory error-checking and automatic correction way beyond the spec, just in case, and because with the design I'd come up with it was actually easier to go a bit overboard than restrict the checking to something less aggressive.</gloat>