6000 BC

Here's an interesting piece of data. It's from the Greening Earth Society, whose Mission Statement is as follows :

The Greening Earth Society provides a scientifically-sound perspective on the increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂ concentration and global climate change.

Well, maybe. I say "maybe" because it is not just overwhelmingly sceptical about Kyoto and the effect of human activity on global temperature - as sceptical as I am - but because it is completely one-sided. As one-sided as the many sites with the opposite view, which never quote any data which might undermine their preconceived opinion.

The chart on the right comes from an article by William Ruddiman, former chairman of the University of Virginia environmental sciences department, and his research team in Quaternary Research Reviews. It shows an increasing concentration of Methane starting in about 5000 BC, which correlates pretty well with the domestication of ruminant herbivores (cows, sheep, goats), and the start of paddyfield rice farming - two major Methane producers.

Methane is 21 times more Greenhouse-y than CO₂. (Source : Worldchanging.com). But the impact is still less than the impact of the additional CO₂, because the amount is so much less.

Another source of methane - which might well overwhelm the contribution of cattle and paddyfields - is the swampy tundra exposed by the end of the last Ice Age. This Ice Age peaked about 20,000 years ago, with much of Europe and North America covered in glaciers 2 km deep. It's last gasp was about 7,000 years ago, when the permanent Arctic Ice cap retreated off major land masses.

The map at the right shows the coverage of Ice over the last 20,000 years, with contours showing how the ice retreated.

The CO₂ concentration is more problematic. It doesn't correlate well with human activity, as Humans have been using "slash and burn" techniques for 40,000 years, which radically change the CO₂ levels - sometime decreasing them as hungry new growth sucks up Carbon, while the charred remnants of old-growth get buried along with much of their carbon content.

The atmospheric CO₂ concentration has been growing steadily in a linear fashion for the last 8000 years. Which again correlates well with the glacial retreat, but not human activity. There's no evidence of a population explosion 8000 years ago, and if anything, we stopped building so many campfires when the Ice retreated.

The article in "Greening Earth" posits that this increased atmospheric CO₂ concentration is all that is staving off another Ice Age. It only takes a drop of 2 Celsius to cause one.

They may be right.

On the other hand, there's data over the last 1000 years that shows global temperatures to be more strongly correlated with Solar Output than anything else. The Sun is an unusually variable star for its position on the main sequence, something that might explain why Intelligent life is found here, and not everywhere. Perhaps the best conditions for "growing" intelligent life are a (slightly) variable star to cause Ice Ages (a booster to Evolution), a Double-Planet system to cause tectonic activity (but not too much) (another booster to Evolution) and tides (very important when moving from single-celled to multi-cellular organisms), and a massive Gas Giant or Failed star a long way out to help sweep up asteroids so planets in the "goldilocks zone" where water is liquid don't have their reset buttons pushed too often by Dinosaur-killers. (The Earth-Moon binary system is a double-planet one, though we don't normally think of the Moon as a planet, and Jupiter is an excellent vacuum cleaner of comets - see Schmacher-Levy).

It could be that the situation is considerably worse in the medium term (the next 5-10,000 years) than the Greenhouse Believers state. We may get hit with a double-whammy of increased solar output (which would normally cause the glaciers that should be covering Europe by now to retreat), and increased CO₂. Something like this could cause the Methane Hydrate that's buried in the ocean floor to evaporate - then we'd have a *real* problem, with temperatures rising a degree or more in a relatively short time as the oceans fizz.

Certainly I believe that we need more data, and models which explain what the heck has happened over the last 10-20,000 years. Something none, repeat, none, of the current computer climate models do. The ones that Kyoto is based on.

It is my evaluation that the Greenhouse Theory is junk science, to put it bluntly. But that we need to study what the heck really is going on, and do what we can, within reason, to slow down the growth of human-emitted CO₂, until we know more about what the cause of atmospheric composition is, and what the effects are. "First, do no harm".

Right now though, we have a big problem, due to politics and vested interests. There are people on both sides of the Greenhouse debate who believe the Greenhouse theory is correct. There are also people, again on both sides of the debate, who believe the theory is completely bogus.

On one side, the "true believers" who look at the evidence, and see Venus in our future unless we get off our backsides. With them are people who think it's all hogwash, but that the Kyoto accords are harmless, and who don't want to risk their Academic careers being terminated for being "politically incorrect". It has happened, and only rarely has a happy ending. You want money for research, you toe the Party Line.

On the other side, you have people who look at the evidence, and see that we don't know nearly enough to make any sane conclusion, but that there's nothing we can do for good or ill that will have much effect in the next 200 years or so. You also have people who are "True Believers" in Global Warming, but figure that a technological fix will be found (as it always has been in the past) and who look at the costs of doing something and say "Let others get pay for it, not me". You want money for research, you say what Big Energy wants you to say.

"Oh, what Fools these Mortals Be!" and all that jazz.

Calling William Wilberforce...

For once, I'll let the facts speak for themselves.

From the BBC :

The government of Niger has cancelled at the last minute a special ceremony during which at least 7,000 slaves were to be granted their freedom.

A spokesman for the government's human rights commission, which had helped to organise the event, said this was because slavery did not exist.
[...]
At least 43,000 people across Niger are thought to be in slavery.

Representatives of the slaves, the government and human rights campaigners had been due to attend the event at In Ates, near the border with Mali.

A local chief had agreed to the release after the introduction of a new law, which punishes those found guilty of slavery with up to 30 years in jail.

Anti-Slavery International had described the ceremony as a historic step forward.

The British-based campaign group said the people who had been due to be freed made up 95% of the local population.

"The government needs to ensure not only that the law is implemented, but that there are the means of support available for former slaves and their children to live their lives in freedom and independence," the group's Africa programme officer, Romana Cacchioli, said before the ceremony was cancelled.

According to a local anti-slavery organisation, Timidria, males slaves are forced to work in farms and tender cattle, while women are confined to domestic duties.

Acting under pressure, Niger's parliament banned the keeping or trading in slaves in May 2003.

In a ceremony in December 2003, dozens of slaves were liberated, many of them shedding tears of joy as they were given certificates showing they were free.

That's 2003, not 1803.

Then there's this :

Assibit, 50, describes life as a slave in Niger, where 43,000 people are estimated to be in bonded labour, as the Timidria organisation which helped her escape wins an award in London.
[...]
Assibit was born into slavery - as was her mother, her husband and her five children.

The government says it is trying to clamp down on slavery - and has introduced laws so that slave owners can be punished - but still there are estimated to be tens of thousands of people in Niger in bonded labour.

That's from the 3rd of November, 2004. Not 1804.

But the problem isn't confined to "Deepest, Darkest Africa". Here's some testimony before the US Congress, Dated March 9th, 2005. :

At the job agent’s office in Beirut, my passport is taken away. The agency staff makes me stand in line with a group of women in the same predicament as me. Lebanese men and women pace in front of us, examining our bodies as if we were vacuum cleaners. I am sold to a wealthy woman, who takes me home to her mansion up on the forth floor of a condo building.

My chores seem unending. I wash the windows, walls, and bathrooms. I shampoo carpets, polish floors, and clean furniture. After twenty hours I am still not done. There’s no food on my plate for dinner, so I scavenge through the trash. I try to call the job agency, but the woman who now owns me has locked the telephone. I try to flee the apartment, but she has locked the door.

I can feel the burning on my cheeks as she slaps me. It is night and her kids have gone to sleep. Grasping me by the hair, she bangs my head into the wall and throws me to the floor. She kicks me and hits me with a broom. If I scream or fight back, she will kill me. So I bite my lips to bare the pain and then I pass out. This is my daily routine, the life of a slave.

And from the UK Telegraph :

As though time had turned back at least a century, tribal raiders are swooping on the villages of eastern Congo and carrying off their human booty to slave camps where order is enforced with beatings and amputations.

They come in the cool hours before dawn, their presence announced by the clanging of a cow bell that echoes through the hillside hamlets of the Hema tribe, overlooking Lake Albert in Congo's Ituri district.

Armed with machetes and machineguns, the raiders scythe through the rows of huts, torching their thatched roofs.

Mothers clutching their screaming children run through the flames into the arms of their captors, members of a militia from the rival Lendu tribe.

The fat and the elderly, those unsuited for work on the Lendu farms or in the gold and mineral mines they illegally occupy, are hacked to death.
[...]
The United Nations peacekeeping force MONUC recently managed to secure the release of 3,000 slaves after threatening military action against the militiamen holding them.
[...]
A little further down the fetid alleyway dividing the line of shelters in Tchomia, Francoise Ndroza is engaged in a similar battle to save the life of her four-month-old son Dieu, ill with acute diarrhoea. She too managed to escape the camp, where she was used as a sex slave - repeatedly raped by her captors on a daily basis.

When she tried to resist they drove a large pestle into her wrist, shattering the bones.

Leopold's regime was ended by outrage in Britain and America. Authors such as Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad, whose novel Heart of Darkness was a fictional account of the horrors of Leopold's Congo, joined the campaign. This time the world has offered little condemnation of the foreign businessmen and local militiamen whose greed to exploit Congo's natural wealth has fuelled a war more deadly than any other since 1945.

And from the Scotsman :

Nigerian police found more than 60 children packed into a shipping container in Lagos, and a police said it was believed they were to be sold as slaves or servants.

A woman accompanying the children was arrested after the discovery of the 60-70 boys and girls aged five to 14 yesterday.

Intellectual Arrogance

Via Yet Another Weird SF Fan, a thought-provoking (accent on the provoking) article about the imbalance of political viewpoints in Academe. One choice quote:

The reason why various departments in humanities and social sciences do not hire conservatives is the same reason no department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology would ever hire a creationist - they are wrong. Their research method is useless: starting with the conclusions then cherry-picking "evidence" to support the conclusions. That is how creationists operate. That is how conservatives operate. That is not quality work and there is no reason why any department should hire such sub-standard faculty. The important question is how come such ass-idiots ever got hired and tenured in departments of business, economics, religion and law? Isn't THAT the real example of ideologically-based hiring? There is no other explanation for them being hired in the first place. Quality of their work and thought could not possibly have been a cause for their hire.

Here's another quote, this time from David Hume :

"When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities"

I'm with Hume on this one. But you knew that.

So why have I quoted from this article? Because despite the arrogance and (IMHO) at times absurdity, it is thought-provoking, and the blog as a whole has a lot of merit. It's by someone whose had to suffer more than their fair share of fools, gladly or otherwise. Not for those who mind searching for diamonds in a dungheap, but rewarding for those who don't. Besides which, if my whole thesis is that we should have more diversity, I shouldn't just be linking to people I agree with. I'm arrogant, but not that arrogant.

Talking about arrogance, here's another quote, this time from W.V.Mayer.

Arrogance comes in a variety of forms. The arrogance of great wealth, the arrogance of great power, the arrogance of great beauty, and the arrogance of a great master are bearable because they rest on an acknowledged and measurable base. The arrogance of ignorance, however, is unbearable because it is rooted in smug satisfaction with being isolated from the facts of the case.

There's no way I'd call Bora Zivkovic ignorant. To do so would automatically destroy the last shred of any credibility I had. But the "smug satisfaction" label fits, showing that it's not just the ignorant who can suffer from this. A lesson to us all - myself most definitely included.

Don't Panic

Today, for your edification and amusement, I present 2 Games:

The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and
The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Scores and positions in the two different games are interchangeable - you can start in one, then switch to the other, then back again. Which is improbable, but not infinitely so.

These are based on the old Infocom publications, from way back in 1984. I used to have one for the C64 (IIRC), on 5 1/4" Floppy (remember those?). Maybe in the new version(s) I can finally follow Marvin through the sliding doors...

Hat Tip : TramTown. Told you I should have gone there more often.

Tales of Future Past

No, not the classic Moody Blues Album (the one containing "Nights in White Satin"), that's Days of Future Past.

This one's courtesy of Tramtown, an excellent blog I should visit more often.

So many blogs, so little time.

Tales of Future Past is an extensive site, detailing The Future from the perspective of 60-90 years ago.

It's a site full of wry wit and some insight.

... those who made such predictions never really considered the effect that such weapons can have on a society even if their use is only a potential, which is particularly odd because the people of the '20s, '30s and '40s had first-hand experience of some of the most nightmarish wars in human history. Meanwhile, those of us who lived through the Cold War were well aware of the prospect of ending up as piles of radioactive brochettes, which tended to put the damper on the best of parties.

Consider the title illustration above from 1915. It depicts the Radium Destroyer; an insect-legged fighting machine of utter destruction sporting a radium death ray capable of laying waste to whole continents faster than an EU directive. Such power blasting wide and free would have even given General Jack D. Ripper pause. And this was supposed to be light reading!

If you want to see the illustration in question, just surf on over there. You won't regret it. For an extra treat, try turning off the graphics - some of the "alt" (alternative text") captions are hilarious.

Beauty I'd always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I can't say anymore.

Sorry, that's the album. But appropriate, nonetheless.

Four More Beers! Four More Beers!

Here's an essential article for Visitors to Australia : A Guide to Ordering Beers.

Australia is about the same size as the continental USA, but with the population of Texas. Or, for Europeans, it's about the same size as Europe from Gibraltar to the Urals, Sicily to Sweden, but with the population of Benelux.

Australia is also a Federation of states. States with quite different histories and climates, ranging from the former Penal Colony of NSW, to the Free Settlers in South Australia, the vast deserts of Western Australia through to the mountainous rainforests of Tasmania.

We all drive on the left - but until recently, road rules were as varied as they are in Europe (or the US), and we still have a variety of railway gauges, from Broad Gauge in Victoria, to Standard Gauge in New South Wales, to Narrow Gauge in much of Queensland.

Similarly, in Victoria and South Australia, "Football" means Aussie Rules. In NSW and Queensland, it means Rugby League. Nowhere does it mean Association Football - "Soccer".

Australia is highly urbanised - more so than Europe, and a lot more so than the US. Nearly 50% of the population lives in just 2 cities - which are a thousand kilometres apart, with not-a-lot in between. Each of the Australian States is basically a single capital city, perhaps 2 or 3 cities less than 1/10 of the size, and a hinterland whose population is best described as "sparse". These city-states treat each other with the same degree of rivalry as the city-states of Medieval Italy. Queenslanders are "Banana Benders", Victorians are "Mexicans" (South of the Border), and to South Australians, the only good thing to come out of Sydney is the Hume Highway.

So the Guide is essential reading, so you know how much you'll be getting. A "Schooner" in South Australia is not the same thing as a "Schooner" in NSW. And a WA "Pot" is a Pint, elsewhere it's half that (if they understand that measure at all).

Now as to which beer to drink... that's best left to another article.

100,000 Page Views

Please look at the Site Meter to the lower left.

Current Stats for Page Views:
Total 99,684
Average Per Day 258

So sometime in the next 48 hours, it will reach 6 figures.

If you're the lucky 100,000^th page viewer, please e-mail me to win a Valuable Prize.

My thanks, anyway. That's the Valuable Prize, I'm afraid.

How Not to Run a Space Programme

I've blogged before about my opinion that the Hubble is past its use-by date, and is better "mended with a new 'un" than repaired.

I'm still of this view, but it would be nice to see the numbers that confirm my initial analysis. I thought we had them, after all, NASA has stubbornly refused to go along with popular opinion and try a repair. I naturally assumed that they'd done a bit more research than I had.

From SpaceDaily :

NASA officials have claimed they performed a risk analysis before deciding to cancel the last space-shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, but no such analysis was ever done.

Worse, sources told UPI's Space Watch that NASA also has ignored at least one proposal to reduce the risk of sending a shuttle crew to Hubble - in order to justify its decision.

Over the past few weeks, several NASA officials have stated publicly the agency's decision to cancel further servicing to Hubble was made on safety issues alone, not cost.

At a budget briefing Feb. 7, Bill Readdy, associate administrator for space operations, explained how cost was not a factor in the decision to cancel the shuttle servicing mission, which was made public by former NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe on Jan. 16, 2004.

"I don't really think from a space operations standpoint ... or in the mind of the administrator it was a matter of cost," Readdy said.

Fred Gregory, the acting NASA administrator, emphasized this position in testimony before the House Science Committee on Feb. 17.

"Cost was not an issue as we evaluated whether (the shuttle) could go to the Hubble," he said.

Instead, these and other NASA officials claimed the decision to cancel the last shuttle servicing mission to Hubble was made after careful analysis of the risks involved.

As Gregory told Congress, "Administrator O'Keefe made a very conscious, deliberate and well-informed decision that the shuttle would not service the Hubble."

When asked by Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., chairman of the science committee, and Vernon Ehlers, R-Mich., for a copy of that risk analysis report, Gregory agreed to provide it.

Yet, one day later, NASA historian Steve n Dick gave a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, in which he described the process by which that decision was made and revealed that, in fact, no formal risk analysis had been completed.
[...]
According to Dick's interviews, risk was the major factor in the discussion, but the officials decided a formal risk analysis was unnecessary. Instead, Dick noted, "The decision was made (by O'Keefe) based on what he perceived was the risk."

In other words, O'Keefe canceled the Hubble mission solely on his gut feeling of the situation. So, the only way NASA can provide the House Science Committee's requested copy of that risk analysis from December 2003 is to recreate it after the fact.

As of Thursday there was no word on whether NASA submitted the requested document.

Now it could be that even a preliminary, informal risk analysis showed that the risk was too high by orders of magnitude, so a full-blown formal analysis was not needed for technical reasons. Frankly, I doubt this is the case, but let's give NASA management the benefit of the doubt. But assuming it is the case, then a quick, 2-day study would reveal this, and would provide the necessary political cover with almost no expenditure. "Gut Feeling" or Intuition is a useful and often valuable tool for analysis, but it should always be checked by logic and numbers wherever possible. Even a small, semi-formal check. Always.

Instead, this looks like arrogance and managerial incompetence of the highest (or rather, lowest) level. It makes O'Keefe look like an arrogant fool - and in this case, appearances aren't completely deceptive.

I wouldn't have made a "gut feeling" decision like this in such a high-handed manner on a project whose cost would exceed $1,000, let alone $1,000,000,000. No competent engineer would have. No competent manager would have.

I still think that the decision is correct, of course, and am fairly confident that the numbers will provide the proof. But I have no delusions of Godhead or Infallibility, and believe that neither NASA Administrators nor Supreme Pontiffs speaking "ex Cathedra" are Infallible either.

What's worrying is that no-one at NASA blew the whistle on this one - if their corporate culture is such that "Intuitive Decisions From On High" even if probably correct aren't always checked as a matter of course, then they're in a heap of trouble. Brown-nosing, and "Crossing Fingers and Hoping For The Best" is no way to run a Church Fete, let alone a Space Programme.

UPDATE : Cumudgeon's Corner and Transterrestrial Musings are all over this.

The (Voluntary) Draft

There's been a fair amount of talk (usually in a US context) recently about "Selective Service", "National Service", call it what you will. I prefer the word "State Slave" rather than "Draftee", because that's what it is, state-enforced temporary slavery.

No-one in the military wants slaves draftees because slaves only make good soldiers when either brainwashed ( see the Jannissaries ), or fighting against slavery.

When I worked in Germany, I was amazed and disconcerted by the sheer waste in productivity caused by having intelligent people (who in Australia would already be going to University or engaging in productive work) trudging about the countryside, driving trucks and marching, marching, marching. Military Conscription is horrendously wasteful of economic resources, and these days, professional Warfare is such a high-skill occupation that it takes many years to learn it adequately. Too long for an unwilling "temporary state slave" to learn.

Yet we draft our children into an education system for 12 years, and this is usually thought to be a Good Thing. I certainly think so. So there must be some "Pro" as well as "Con".

If I ruled the world... I might institute a Draft of sorts. Not into the military - though by volunteering for the military (or other emergency services), you could "dodge the draft". And emphatically not as a form of slavery, a "Starship Troopers"-like semi-compulsory service useful to the State - if we need more people to help staff nursing homes or do social work, we should pay them more. No, it's as a form of compulsory, or at least, "strongly encouraged" education. Education in things like Civil Defence, First Aid, Search and Rescue, Firefighting, Surf Lifesaving, skills which would be useful in case of Disaster, natural or otherwise.

The idea would be to provide a "surge capacity" of skills where they could do the most good. So that, for example, if there's a Bushfire, the professional and volunteer firefighters would have a second-line of defence to fall back on, people who could provide "warm bodies" for tasks requiring a relatively low degree of skill (and allow them a much-needed respite). Or so that if someone has a heart attack on a city street, the odds are overwhelming that at least one passer-by knows CPR. Or that if someone is choking to death at a restaurant, there'll be someone who knows and has practiced the Heimlich manouvre. Or even to provide a reserve of "special constables" with minimum legal training and powers who can patrol neighbourhoods while the professional police are dealing with a civil disturbance elsewhere. Even people who know a bit about structural engineering, so they can form ad-hoc rescue teams in the vital first few minutes or hours after an earthquake or landslide.

Should this be compulsory? I think not. Compulsion means that the draftee thinks they have better uses for their time - and sometimes they'll be right. But additional incentive can be supplied by giving "draftees" tax breaks, additional credit when applying for a job or entering higher education, and additional preference for that matter when companies have to "let people go". Certainly government-paid leave and subsidies for employers who have a programme for their staff to do such semi-voluntary work, things like that. Positive Discrimination. With a decent advertising campaign, after a generation or two, Peer Pressure alone might be enough.

Additional benefits would be those adduced by ... wait for it ... the Nazis. An increased cohesiveness in society, with the Rich and the Poor forming teams - though it's called "networking" these days. Showing how "the other half" lives. Which could well lead to a greater degree of equality of income distribution, as the poor see just how much waste and folly the rich indulge in (and demand a greater share of the common wealth), or the rich see just how tough some of the poor are doing it. On the other hand, if the US is any guide, it may lead to the reverse: the self-made rich won't feel guilty about being that way, and would be more hard-hearted to those who had the same opportunities, but wasted them on short-term gratification. Prejudice may well be decreased due to the dissolution of ignorance, but there could be more Justice and less Mercy, which is not neccessarily always a good thing. Remember the Babel Fish :

...by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation

Any such "benefits" are arguable, and probably negligible anyway.

And of course, there's always the danger that what is effectively an Emergency Services "Boy Scout" movement for adults could turn into a politically correct Komsomol or Fascist Hitlerjugend. But the whole idea of this thing is not to instill Virtue (political or otherwise) or Build Character. It's to give people skills, so that in an emergency, if they wish to volunteer, they can be useful.

The one area that it's particularly inappropriate though, is the Military. I'll quote Heinlein on the subject :

I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don't think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can't save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say: Let the damned thing go down the drain! [Heinlein 1961:245]

By all means teach basic urban and rural fieldcraft and survival techniques, so that in case of invasion, irregular defenders can survive long enough to learn the neccessary skills. Many such are also useful to people lost in the wilderness, victims of air crashes etc. But no more than that - there's no time, and there are far more useful skills that should be learned first.

Goody!

Or rather, Goodies! These characters have re-formed, though they're certainly not reformed characters.

From The Australian :

Veteran British comedians The Goodies reckon it's almost as "weird" as their own zany antics that they should be remembered more in Australia than back home.

It's 20 plus years since Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden's manic and crazily irreverent brand of humour has been screened nationally in their own country.

"We are totally forgotten and ignored at home so to actually come here and for anybody to remember who we are is quite weird," Oddie said in Sydney today.

But we owe them

The Goodies first aired on the BBC in November 1970 and ran for 12 years.

They sought to save the world from such bizarre threats as a marauding giant kitten and a plague of Rolf Harrises.

See what I mean? A plague of Rolf Harriss doesn't bear thinking about.

Kyoto - The Numbers

The cost of Kyoto as of this morning was US $ 6,000,000,000

The total possible benefit of this expenditure is no more than 0.000062304 C.

To get a real-time update of these figures, go to JunkScience.

Anyone for Dominoes?

From Silent Running :

... if you're not a highly experienced lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies, you might be forgiven for thinking that Lebanese protestors had just forced the resignation of the pro-Syrian government, or that Egypt had just cracked under pressure and moved towards contested elections, and certain naive, half-educated people in America might be under the misapprehension that some sort of domino effect was occuring in which "democracy" was sweeping the Arab world.

But of course that's ridiculous. To believe that, you'd have to swallow the concept that George W Bush is some sort of geo-strategic genius who decided that in order to prevent ever more deadful terrorist acts against the West, the problem of terrorism would have to be tackled at its source in the Middle East.

Er, it really shouldn't have taken a genius to figure this out, and IMHO it didn't. It did take a lot of courage to grasp the nettle though. Fools - and Heroes - rush in where Angels fear to tread.

And further, one would have to believe that the invasion of Afghanistan was a neccessary first step in destroying the main Al Qaeda base of operations, while the invasion of Iraq was partly to destroy a key terrorist enabling reigime while laying the foundations for a genuinely democratic government which might act as an example to the rest of the region that change was possible.

Or you could go and read Mark Steyn on the subject.

Three years ago - April 6 2002, if you want to rummage through the old Spectators in the attic - I wrote: "The stability junkies in the EU, UN and elsewhere have, as usual, missed the point. The Middle East is too stable. So, if you had to pick only one regime to topple, why not Iraq? Once you've got rid of the ruling gang, it's the West's best shot at incubating a reasonably non-insane polity. That's why the unravelling of the Middle East has to start not in the West Bank but in Baghdad."


I don't like to say I told you so. But, actually, I do like to say I told you so. What I don't like to do is the obligatory false self-deprecatory thing to mitigate against the insufferableness of my saying I told you so. But nevertheless I did.

Consider just the past couple of days' news: not the ever more desperate depravity of the floundering "insurgency", but the real popular Arab resistance the car-bombers and the head-hackers are flailing against: the Saudi foreign minister, who by remarkable coincidence goes by the name of Prince Saud, told Newsweek that women would be voting in the next Saudi election. "That is going to be good for the election," he said, "because I think women are more sensible voters than men."

Four-time Egyptian election winner - and with 90 per cent of the vote! - President Mubarak announced that next polling day he wouldn't mind an opponent. Ordering his stenographer to change the constitution to permit the first multi-choice presidential elections in Egyptian history, His Excellency said the country would benefit from "more freedom and democracy". The state-run TV network hailed the president's speech as a "historical decision in the nation's 7,000-year-old march toward democracy". After 7,000 years on the march, they're barely out of the parking lot, so Mubarak's move is, as they say, a step in the right direction.

Meanwhile in Damascus, Boy Assad, having badly overplayed his hand in Lebanon and after months of denying that he was harbouring any refugee Saddamites, suddenly discovered that - wouldja believe it? - Saddam's brother and 29 other bigshot Baghdad Baathists were holed up in north-eastern Syria, and promptly handed them over to the Iraqi government.

Of course he wrote this before the Arab Street (Lebanese Branch) toppled their Quisling government.

Now one swallow does not a Summer make. And Damascus is still under a Ba'athist National Socialist regime. There's a long way to go.

Dominoes, anyone?

Humourous Videos

For those with broadband, or at least the capability to download 0.2-2 Mb Zip files, humourous videos. See Bill gates get a cream pie in the face. Or what happens when the towing of a car out of a snowdrift is a partial success. And that's just a few on the first page.

Japan's Lunar Ambitions ?

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has just launched its first booster in 15 months.
At one stage, the Japanese Space Program looked like it was in deep trouble. There was talk in the Diet of abandoning the booster program altogether, after the first failure of an H2A (mentioned on this blog).

The thing is, the H2A is quite an advanced booster. It uses a cryogenic Liquid Hydrogen/Liquid Oxygen fuel, with solid-fuel strap-on boosters, much as the Space Shuttle. But disposable, rather than re-usable.

I have a soft spot for the H2A - it was the booster that carried FedSat up into Low Earth Orbit, and did so absolutely flawlessly. It also carried a bus-sized multi-ton Earth Resources Technology satellite, and 2 other microsatellites - it has a respectable payload, though not in the Ariane-V or Energia class.

Now from the AFP via The Australian :

Japan's space agency, fresh from its first satellite launch since a 2003 failure, wants to put a manned station on the moon in 2025 and to set up a satellite disaster alert system.

"We will include it as one of the future goals in our new long-term vision, which we are going to submit with the government's Space Activity Commission by the end of March," said an official with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

By 2015, the space agency also wants to establish a system that would transmit disaster information via satellites to mobile telephones on Earth, he said.

"We are still compiling our long-term vision. There are many things we want to include," said the official.

He was responding to a report by the Mainichi Shimbun, which said Japan planned to develop a robot to explore the moon in five years and within 10 years the technology to let humans stay on the moon for extended periods.

In 20 years, it will start development of the space station to be built on the moon to conduct scientific research, the Mainichi said.

To realise the goal, the agency aims to develop Japan's own manned space craft, similar to the US Space Shuttle, the Mainichi said.

The official of the space agency declined to discuss details of the agency's plan, but said the Mainichi report "was not necessarily all wrong".

You must remember that Emperor Hirohito's speech announcing that Japan had surrendered used a similar phrase :

...the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage...

Which hints that it may be exactly on target in every respect. Of course, they'll be facing some competition. The AFP report continues:

The United States is planning a lunar orbiter by 2008 to be followed the next year by a landing mission. By 2015 it plans to put a person on the moon, the first since another American, Eugene Cernan, on December 11, 1972.

US President George W Bush has set the goal of a manned mission to Mars by 2020.

The European Space Agency also plans to launch an orbiter to the moon by 2008 and a second mission, a lander, in 2009 or 2010 to be followed by a human flight in 2020.

China, a longtime recipient of Japan's aid but now its growing rival, has vowed to launch an unmanned lunar exploration craft before 2007, with a goal of landing a spacecraft on the moon in 2010.

India, which often compares and contrasts its progress to that of China, has scheduled its own lunar mission for 2007 and, if successful, wants another one by 2015.

The Soviet Union in 1959 was the first country to complete a moon orbit. But cash-strapped Russia has not launched a planetary mission since 1996.

The Russians hope to launch their next unmanned mission in 2009 to land on Phobos, a moon orbiting Mars.

The dates for the US do not appear to be consistent with a realistic timeframe for the CEV (as mentioned in a previous article).

The recent launch of the Ariane-5 ECA from the European Space Agency caused me to have another look at its performance. It compares very favourably to a Saturn 1B, (though not to a Saturn V Apollo Moon Rocket). ESA thus has the lifting capability, using 3 Ariane-5 ECA's, to send up the components for a crewed lunar mission. One to carry the lander, one to carry a "kicker" booster to take the mission to the moon and back, and a command/re-entry module for the crew.

But none of the ESA gear is man-rated, and from personal experience, I can state that the ESA standards documentation (which we used for FedSat) treats man-rated gear quite differently: the additional tests and reliability requirements are immense.

So don't expect another set of footprints on the Moon this decade, and probably not the next either. After that though, there could be quite a few projects coming to fruition. Interesting times. Perhaps there will even be some co-operation, formal or informal. What do I mean by informal? Well, on FedSat, we used ESA documentation, development and telemetry standards, a NASA-supplied GPS system, and a Japanese Booster to launch a UK-designed Australian-constructed satellite (with a South-African Boom and a Canadian attitude control system). And despite this, it all worked, and continues to work today.

State of the Middle East, Summarised

Partly the same old, same old. Everything's the fault of the Jews, who this time have been going around bombing themselves. :

Syria has strongly denied accusations by Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz that it had a hand in a Tel Aviv bombing later claimed by Islamic Jihad, which killed four Israelis as well as the bomber.

"Syria has no connection with this operation and the [Damascus] office of this movement [Islamic Jihad] is closed," a foreign ministry official said, asking not to be named.

"We think that the Israeli Defence Minister's comments show that he knows the identity of the real perpetrator and that he's to be found inside Israel," the official said.

"Israel is known around the world for sabotaging any peace process."

But Mr Mofaz had been categorical in his remarks.

"We have proof directly linking Syria to this attack," Army radio quoted the Defence Minister as telling a meeting of security chiefs in Tel Aviv.

I wonder if MSM (Mainstream Media) will publish that proof? Or even mention it on page 92?

But there are some encouraging signs. :

More than one candidate will be able to stand in presidential elections in Egypt under a constitutional change proposed by President Hosni Mubarak, a step welcomed by several opposition groups.

An election with more than one candidate? What an outrageous idea. No really, anywhere except Israel and now Iraq, it really is an outrageous idea, a dangerous and destabilising one that those in power are deathly afraid of. And they're right to be.

Intelligence 18, Wisdom 3

Readers who have played any FRP (Fantasy Role Playing) games such as D&D will recognise the meaning of the title. For everyone else, it would take a long time to explain, but you should be able to get the gist of it from the article I'm referring to.

That article is one I read about in 1998, in Harper's Magazine. The Tall Tale but True of the Radioactive Boy Scout.

It's the story of an archetypical nerd, someone who pushed the bounds of nerdom where no-one had gone before, and hopefully won't again. A senior High-school student who thought it would be really neat to build a model of a breeder reactor. A working model.

David went into a serious depression after the federal authorities shut down his laboratory. Years of painstaking work had been thrown in the garbage or buried beneath the sands of Utah. Students at Chippewa Valley had taken to calling him "Radioactive Boy," and when his girlfriend, Heather, sent David Valentine's balloons at his high school, they were seized by the principal, who apparently feared they had been inflated with chemical gases David needed to continue his experiments. In a final indignity, some area scout leaders attempted (and failed) to deny David his Eagle Scout status, saying that his extracurricular merit-badge activities had endangered the community.

In the fall of 1995, Ken and Kathy demanded that David enroll in Macomb Community College. He majored in metallurgy but skipped many of his classes and spent much of the day in bed or driving in circles around their block. Finally, Ken and Kathy gave him an ultimatum: Join the armed forces or move out of the house. They called the local recruiting office, which sent a representative to their house or called nearly every day until David finally gave in. After completing boot camp last year, he was stationed on the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise aircraft carrier.

Alas, David's duties, as a lowly seaman, are of the deck-swabbing and potato-peeling variety. But long after his shipmates have gone to sleep, David stays up studying topics that interest him--currently steroids, melanin, genetic codes, antioxidants, prototype reactors, amino acids, and criminal law. And it is perhaps best that he does not work on the ship's eight reactors

Yes, I'd say so. Definitely.

...for EPA scientists worry that his previous exposure to radioactivity may have greatly cut short his life.

My worry is not so much for him, as everyone around him. The concept of "common sense" is foreign to him, as it is to many of the hyper-intelligent. His value system is different.

Keeping him as a swabbie is a dangerous waste though. A waste because his intellect could be harnessed and used for some really worthwhile purposes. And dangerous because while he's pushing round a broom (something that doesn't require much in the way of higher brain functions), he can think about genetic research, backyard reactors, and criminal law. Which of the three is the most dangerous, I don't know.

He really needs to be placed in a well-equipped lab, along with a keeper, a prosthetic source of common sense. He'd be happier, and the world more safe.

Thanks to The Stupid Shall Be Punished for reminding me of this story.

Those Magnificent Men and their Flaming Latrines

Today's Cat post. Catapult that is. Well, Trebuchet.

From the Wall Street Journal :

Mr. Kennedy has been studying and writing about ancient engines of war since his days at Sandhurst, Britain's military academy, some 30 years ago. But what spurred him to build one was, as he puts it, ``my nutter cousin'' in Northumberland, who put together a pint-sized trebuchet for a county fair.

...as you do...

The device hurled porcelain toilets soaked in gasoline and set afire. A local paper described the event under the headline "Those Magnificent Men and Their Flaming Latrines."

What's interesting is how they figured out the mass of the projectiles. Medieval artists weren't too concerned about things like drawing relative sizes accurately, and the principles of perspective were still hundreds of years in the future.

Building a full-sized siege engine is a more daunting task. Mr. Kennedy believes that dead horses are the key.

Well, naturally.

That's because engravings usually depict the trebuchet hurling boulders, and there is no way to determine what the rocks weigh, or the counterweight necessary to fling them. But a few drawings show dead horses being loaded onto trebuchets, putrid animals being an early form of biological warfare. Since horses weigh now what they did in the 1300s, the engineering calculations followed easily.

One thing has frustrated Mr. Kennedy and his partner: They haven't found any commercial value to the trebuchet.

Oh, but every home should have at least one! As Avon Lady Repellant. Or a quick method of garbage disposal. In the UK, for Home-Defense, as guns are apparently illegal. There must be a thousand uses.

Finally, there's the prospect of flinging a man into space - a living man, that it. This isn't a new idea, Mr. Kennedy points out: Trebuchets were often used to fling ambassadors and prisoners of war back over castle walls, a sure way to demoralize the opposition.

Some English sports parachutists think they can throw a man in the air *and* bring him down alive. In a series of experiments on Mr. Kennedy's machine, they've thrown several man-sized logs and two quarter-tone dead pigs into the air; one of the pigs parachuted gently back to earth, the other landed rather more forcefully.

Trouble is, an accelerometer carried inside the logs recorded a centrifugal force during the launch of as much as 20 Gs (the actual acceleration was zero to 90 miles per hour in 1.5 seconds). Scientists are divided over whether a man can stand that many Gs for more that a second or two before his blood vessels burst.

20 g over 1 second would end up as 200 metres/second, near enough. 12 km/minute or 720 km/hr. 0 to 90 mph (call it 160 km/h) in 1.5 secs? 3 gees, no more. Aerobatic aircraft routinely pull more over long periods. And US rocket sled experiments had people pulling 20 gees for several seconds with no ill effects, other than nosebleeds, red eyes, and piles (which fighter pilots also suffer from, they routinely do 5 gee and sometimes 9 or more in short, sharp manouvres).

So it's doable.

As for the Inventor of the Trebuchet?

Only one full-sized one exists today, designed and built by Mr. Kennedy, a wealthy landowner, inventor, military historian and - need it be said? - - full-blown eccentric.

Eccentric? Merely unconventional. And a man after my own heart. But I'm worried about anyone he describes as his "Nutter Cousin" though.

Meanwhile, should you wish to own your own trebuchet - and when it comes down to it, who doesn't? - just surf on over to Trebuchet.com. Kits and plans for fully working models, some so small you can put them on your desktop, others capable of breaching walls of neighbourhood castles.

Or of course, you can always try out the Virtual Trebuchet I mentioned in an earlier post.

Dark Matters

From the BBC via the ABC :

An international team of astronomers says it has discovered an object that appears to be a galaxy without stars.

The galaxy seems to be an astronomical case of arrested development.

Galaxies are usually vast cosmic islands of stars, with the milky way galaxy home to around 100 billion stars.

But the newly discovered galaxy, in the constellation Virgo, seems to have none.

However it does have hydrogen gas, from which stars are made, and there is enough there to make a 100 million stars.

But for some reason stars never formed and astronomers using radio telescopes have instead found a giant gas cloud.

They have also worked out that for every tonne of hydrogen in the galaxy, there is another 1,000 tonnes of so-called dark matter whose identity is one of the great puzzles of modern astronomy.

What is Dark Matter? Well although the blog The Stupid Shall Be Punished says this :

I expect A. E. Brain will have a more substantive post on this later

He's really covered it in sufficient detail, yet remained concise and pithy. I can't subtantially improve on his article, with the URLs on the theoretical background, and I recommend you go there and read the whole thing. I'll wait.

One caution : from the New Scientist :

But far from answering all the questions, VIRGOHI21 is throwing up a number of new ones. One concerns its mass. While the newly discovered galaxy is certainly dark, it may not be the dwarf that astrophysicists were hoping for.

If galaxies were made up only of ordinary matter, their speed of rotation would tear them apart. The extra mass needed to provide the gravitational pull that holds them together is generally thought to come from what is called dark matter.

When Minchin's team measured the speed of rotation of the hydrogen gas in VIRGOHI21, they found that it would have to contain about one-tenth of the dark matter of the Milky Way. But if that is so, it should also have a hundred times as much hydrogen gas as they actually detected. Far from being a dwarf, VIRGOHI21 seems to be a giant in its own right.

Merrifield says that the shortfall in the observed amount of hydrogen may mean that what Minchin and his team have seen is not a dark galaxy after all. "Their story doesn't quite hang together, and I would speculate that they have been fooled by two passing hydrogen clouds." The difference in speed as one passes the other would give the illusion of rotation, he says.

But Minchin is sticking to his guns. "There are so few known hydrogen clouds that to find two together would be extremely unlikely." He thinks they may have underestimated the mass of hydrogen in the dark galaxy. If ultraviolet light from distant quasars were ionising a large proportion of the hydrogen atoms, the gas would be rendered invisible to radio telescopes.

The numbers don't add up: either we, for some unlikely and arcane reason, aren't detecting the amount of hydrogen that's actually there, or our understanding of the whole dark matter (pardon the pun) is fundamentally wrong, or it's an improbable cosmic coincidence. It's certain that our knowledge is incomplete, but by no means certain that it's that incomplete.

Until we find evidence of quaser-UV-induced ionisation (but how would we know?), or setup a really long baseline interferometer (which would give a much higher definition picture), I think this one will remain a puzzle. Considering the distances involved, it's not exactly likely we'll be going to the immediate vicinity any time soon to have a squizz at it "up close and personal".

And by "Really" Long, I don't mean merely a VLB (Very Long Baseline) one, I mean something rather larger. More like what some people are contemplating for optical work. Something with a baseline not in kilometres, or megametres, but Astronomical Units. It's doable with today's technology - and a few billion dollars.

Make it Radio-frequency rather than optical (so data rate and hence power requirement is low), and you can use a brace of quite small birds, each with an inflatable reflective dish antenna. Put them at 1 AU distance instead of hundreds (so you can get power with even a small solar cell array), and the cost might even be in the low hundreds of millions, including launch costs. Put them only as far as Geostationary Orbit, so you can piggy-back on a ComSat heading out that way, and the cost could be less than a hundred million for a 5-year lifespan, based on my experience with FedSat. That close, and we could use GPS for really accurate 3-D positioning too, making them even cheaper. Now they'd not be as spectacular as Hubble, but possibly just as useful for Radio Astronomers, and as a project, vastly cheaper and less risky. Nowhere near as good as a 200-AU baseline array, but dramatically better than anything we could ever build on Earth.

If only Australia hadn't abandoned its space programme again, this is the type of thing that we could and should be doing. Something that might even pay its way or (Gadzooks!) make a profit from on-selling the data.

Of course an array of such birds, with antennae pointed the other way, might make very good SigInt (Signals Intelligence - Eavesdroppers) military satellites too. So we may even be able to use off-the-shelf parts, assuming some of these Dark Stars and Black Projects already exist. And if not, well, maybe the Military might be interested in subsidising a few extra birds, for their own use.

Dark matters indeed.

The Desktop Strikes Back

There's a classic surveillance video, called A Bad Day, showing a poor, defenceless computer being attacked by a berserk user. (Larger version available here.)

Alas, as you may have surmised, it's too good to be true. :

When Bad Day debuted, it was thought to be a candid mini-psychodrama showing the stress endured by the modern worker. It turned out to be an advertising clip for an office surveillance company.

But now there's a short online video of a similar situation, showing what would happen with today's new, vicious security measures in action.

Enjoy.

Hat Tip : Utterly Boring

Losing Track

Go to any satellite tracking web page, and this is what you're likely to get:

SpaceTrack.org:

Due to existing National Security Restrictions pertaining to access of and use of U.S. Government-provided information and data, all users accessing this web site must be an approved registered user to access data on this site.

SatPasses:

Note: We sincerely regret that due to changes in federal regulations we are no longer able to publish ISS pass predictions!

NASA Spacelink :

NASA Spacelink has Moved
NASA Spacelink and other information providers across NASA are moving content into the NASA home page. The NASA home page is now the best place to find the type of content you have come to expect from Spacelink. The Spacelink team looks forward to serving you through NASA's premier Web site

But if you go to the NASA site, there's nothing on satellite tracking. Nada. Zip. Tiddly-squat. Bugger all.

Why? From CelesTrack:

As a result of legislation passed by the US Congress and signed into law on 2003 November 24 (Public Law 108-136, Section 913[PDF]), Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) has embarked on a three-year pilot program to provide space surveillance data—including NORAD two-line element sets (TLEs)—to non-US government entities (NUGE). This service was to be established "not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment" of Section 913 or by 2004 May 22 (paragraph (i)). AFSPC officials have indicated that the NASA OIG web site—which is the source of CelesTrak's data—would be operated until 2004 October 1 (less than two months from today) to allow users to get the information necessary to plan their transition to this new data service. This transition time is extremely important because Public Law 108-136 prohibits the redistribution of the data obtained from this new NUGE service "without the express approval of the Secretary" [of Defense] (paragraph (d)(2)).

Unfortunately, as of this date, AFSPC has yet to establish this service or even notify the satellite user community of the pending change in data dissemination practices. As a result, there is no information on the timeline for the transition, the process required to obtain access to the new system, the policies regarding who can obtain data, how much they can obtain, and how frequently, or even the specific system processes required for users to integrate the new data source into their existing processes. Without this information and sufficient time to notify users and allow them to implement the necessary changes, a wide variety of current satellite operations activities may be adversely impacted.
[...]
Update #10 (2005 February 11): After a week without any new data from the NASA/GSFC OIG web site, the following notice was posted there today:

The OIG web site has encountered severe technical difficulties which cannot be overcome. The OIG web site will continue to run a once per day update of TLEs. Real time updates cannot be done. Please go to the Space-Track web site for real time data. The OIG site will be permanently disabled on 3/31/05. If other problems are encountered to render the site useless, a notice will be posted to the Space-Track web site. 02/11/2005

[...]
Update #11 (2005 February 14):...The following notice was posted on the NASA OIG web site today:

As of February 10, 2005 the NASA/GSFC OIG web site experienced non-recoverable hardware and software failures. As of Monday 2/14/05 no further attempts to recover the system will be made. Please go to the Space-Track web site for TLE information. 02/14/2005

It appears there will be no new data from NASA, despite the promise of a 90-day transition period.

HobbySpace has an accurate summary.

Congress, in its collective ham-fisted oafishness, dictated after 9/11 that the government place restrictions on access to spacecraft tracking information. Apparently, this will keep terrorists from shooting down comsats with RPGs.

Such access previously has been free and easily obtained from NORAD. Various services redistributed the tracking data to astronomers, satellite tracking hobbyists, space radio enthusiasts, etc. Tracking programs such as CelesTrak, for example, can automatically update their satellite tracking elements.

Recently, however, a NASA site that provided tracking data has gone off-line, despite a promise of a 90 day transition period. Users must now go to Space-Track to obtain the data. This only requires a free registration but users are not allowed to redistribute the tracking elements. So all those web sites and tracking programs out there will no longer be able to provide current data, at least if they are US based.

See, for example, SatPasses, which provided tracking predictions as to when the ISS would pass over US cities. Now the site says:

Note: We sincerely regret that due to changes in federal regulations we are no longer able to publish ISS pass predictions!

I'm sure the ISS astronauts now feel much, much safer from terrorist assaults!
[...]
Congress once again shows that it is incapable of making sensible policies with respect to space that carefully and effectively targets the particular problem without causing devastating collateral damage to nearby legitimate activity.

So right now, thanks to ill-thought-out legislation, a replacement well behind schedule, and a catastrophic hardware and software failure of the "temporary fix", the Internet is a Trackless Waste.

Hat Tip Transterrestrial Musings

Our Enemies, Our Allies

Not so long ago, the Iraqi nation was at war with Australia. But the pinacle of military achievement (pace Sun Tsu*) is not to win without fighting, it's to convert an Enemy into an Ally.

As mentioned over at The Command Post and elsewhere, Australian PM John Howard has just boosted Australia's military commitment to Iraq by about 50%. Why? Well, here's one reason :

"Unless additional security could be provided to replace the Dutch, then there was a real possibility the Japanese could no longer remain there and that would be a serious blow to the coalition effort," Mr Howard said.

It's to help out a friend. No, not the USA, nor even the Iraqis (though I'll get to them later), it's to help out the Japanese, and in particular, the current interventionist Japanese Government, who have come under severe criticism at home for being far too Anti-Fascist. It's a favour to a mate. A mate who (quite un-coincidentally) happens to run a farnarckling huge trade deficit with us, just as we run an equally huge deficit with the USA. And a mate who, like us, is deeply concerned about the Mad Regime of Pyongyang, but unlike us may actually be in range of some of their Nukes.

But it goes beyond that. Again, to quote Johnny Howard :

"The Government believes that Iraq is very much at a tilting point and it's very important that the opportunity of democracy, not only in Iraq but also in other parts of the Middle East, be seized and consolidated," he said.

You Break it, you Buy it. We helped break the National Socialist Dictatorship in Iraq, just as we helped break the Theocratic Fascist regime that had dominated Japan since the early 30's, and the National Socialist Dictatorship of Germany of the same era. It therefore is our ethical responsibility to help install a new system. The Iraqis, by their magnificent performance during the election (and at considerable personal risk to themselves) have done their part, and we owe them big time to help as much as is feasible.

The circumstances have changed and it is now four-and-a-half-weeks since the Iraq election and we have to respond to those changed circumstances," he said.

"Self-evidently we would have liked the major combat to have gone differently ... [but] coalition withdrawal or defeat is unimaginable."
[...]
"It will take time and if we were to see a crumbling of coalition commitment, I think the likelihood of Iraq completing the transition to democracy would be absolutely non-existent," he said.

The point is, the attacks on the Iraqi Government, and in fact, the Iraqi populace in general, haven't abaited. It looks like the Nazis Ba'athists have decided that it if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, and now see their only chance of getting even a few crumbs of the political cake is to co-operate, and become just another political party. Frankly, I think they're having themselves on. We're in no mood to accept anything other than "Unconditional surrender", and more to the point, neither are the Iraqis.

Yet the suicide bombings, the mortar attacks and so on continue. Why? Well, the opposition to the occupation of Iraq consists of 4 different and rather mutually antagonistic forces.

The first are Iraqi Nationalists of all political stripes, who quite understandably object to their country being occupied, no matter what the circumstances.

The second are the Sunni tribes, fearful of Shiite revenge for all the past oppression they've been subject to at Sunni hands, and in fear for their lives. It's not so much a religious as a tribal thing - Iraqis in general don't consider themselves primarily "Sunni" or "Shiite", they consider themselves Iraqis, much as Americans consider themselves Americans first, rather than Catholic or Protestant, Mormon or Jew.

The third group are the Ba'athists, former top dogs who are desperately trying to regain their lost power. Thoroughly entangled with the second group, but still a small subset of them.

The last are mainly foreign Jihadis, who just want to Kill the Heretics, Apostates, Unbelievers, and in general, everyone on the planet who doesn't share their eccentric beliefs, and see Iraq as being a good place to die. Or kill. It's all the same to them. It also includes the various Iranian and Syrian Spooks sent in as the first line of defence against any US-led "regime change" in their respective countries.

The first group - with the usual few fanatical exceptions - have seen that their popular support is weak, and dwindling. They don't represent the views of the Iraqi People as a whole, just a segment of them, and this became obvious at the time of the election. It's they, the true "Resistance", who are being spoken to now.

The Americans should be good at this - because a substantial minority of Americans, would be likely to do the same in their shoes**. Even that perenially clue-free zone, Michael Moore, glimpsed this truth when he said this about the Iraqi resistance

The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win!

Of course, like all of Michael Moore's work, there's a grain of truth buried in copious quantities of great, fragrant, steaming piles of bovine excrement.

The second group now have a mountain of evidence that a Bloodbath against the Sunni tribes just isn't going to happen. Despite repeated and extreme provocation, the Shiites have conducted no anti-Sunni pogroms. Not merely that, but the Moqtada Al-Sadr Bad Boys got their clocks cleaned by the US of A, and are now a spent force, militarily, morally, and at the ballot box, with only 2 representatives elected out of 270-odd in the governing council. These Sunni tribes - and at the risk of being repetitious, it's a tribal thing, rather than a religious one - are fighting simply because they don't know what else to do, they're desperate. The Shiite forebearance is lessening the sense of desperation, and therefore removing the reason to fight.

These two groups are the people that we are trying to get to participate in a peaceful manner in the new Iraqi government. Participation of the second group is essential in the long term, and everyone now knows it, the Shiites included.

As for the third group, the Ba'athists - their attacks are using the IRA/Sinn Fein technique of fighting while negotiating. The more obnoxious they are, the more concessions they can wring at the bargaining table by promising to cease fighting. This is a classic strategy, and usually works. It worked for people as disparate as the Irgun and Hagganah against the British in post-war Palestine, it worked for the IRA in Northern Ireland, for a time it even worked for Arafat and Co. But it doesn't work against people whose blood is up (as Sinn Fein is just finding out). The Kurds (for one) think that the only Good Ba'athist is a Dead Ba'athist, and the odds of National Socialist Ba'ath party ever being legalised and brought into the mainstream of Iraqi political life, even as a small splinter group, are probably even slimmer than a resurgent NSDAP getting a seat in the Bundestag in Germany.

Ain't. Gonna. Happen.

Even if the rest of the Coalition went for it, the Iraqis aren't going to stand for it. And at the election, they earned the right for their wishes to be paramount. Not "listened to" or "consulted with". To be obeyed, without demur.

The real trick is going to be to separate the Ba'athists from the Sunni Tribes. Tricky, as the leaders of one are often the leaders of the other. This again is no doubt the subject of current negotiations - how many designated scapegoats will be enough to satisfy the Kurds? Those so designated are unlikely to go quietly, the Sunni tribes may have to give up the bodies, rather than live war criminals.

The last group, mainly Al-Qaeda-by-any-other-name, well, considering their public "No Surrender!" attitude, rather a lot of their senior hierarchy have been surrendering recently. It's only the small fry that fight to the death, become suicide bombers (and sometimes assisted-suicide bombers). Although they're sometimes useful because of their intelligence value, frankly, they're an embarressment to everybody. In the war against Al Qaeda, we don't want them to surrender, nor to become friends and allies (unless they cease being what they are - see below). We just require them to die. It's their children and grandchildren that we may have a hope of salvaging.

Yemen may have the right idea. After two or three years of patient theological disputation, they have a high conversion rate from Fanatical Heretical Killer to Decent Islamic Human Being. But it's a gamble, and Westerners such as myself could be forgiven for thinking that such "redemption" is probably temporary. Personally, I'd like to see how they go with small numbers over a period of 10 years before using it more widely, but maybe I'm too cynical. It's certainly supremely ironic that such an archetypically forgiving Christian approach should be used by rather orthodox Muslims. If they can pull it off, then they will have attained the most difficult, but worthwhile goal - that of converting Liabilities into Assets, Enemies into Friends, Monsters into Human Beings, and a Sow's ear into a Silk Purse. I wish them the Best of British Luck.***

So,as John Howard said, the situation has changed. The "resistance" hasn't evaporated as completely as it has in, say Afghanistan. But it has lessened so much that Australia can realistically commit over 10% of its effective ground forces in -theatre, something it was unable to promise and guarantee to deliver before. The additional troops won't be there for some "token" or "symbolic" reason, nor to sway any election one way or another, they'll be there for purely practical reasons. They can do good, and at relatively small risk. Australia just does not have the resources to commit to significant "peacekeeping" in Iraq, as well as the Eastern Solomons, Bougainville, Timor Leste, relief operations continuing in Aceh, and all the other commitments we have. Our total armed forces, Army, Navy, and Air Force combined number less than 50,000, and we have only 8 regular battalions. But this much we can do. We can provide local security in a small number of areas, and we can provide training. All in the cause of converting a former enemy, Iraq, into a future friend.

To see how well that can work, remember who we're guarding, the nation whose engineers we'll be protecting as they go about constructing bridges and rail-lines. There are still some Australians living with personal experience of Japanese construction projects. Ones where tens of thousands of prisoners were worked to death, or beheaded at a whim. There are also people like my in-laws whose brothers, fiances, husbands or sons were taken prisoner and used as "food-on-the-hoof" by starving Japanese soldiers in New Guinea - not something that's often mentioned in history books.

These Jihadis do not have the faintest idea of the type of people they're up against, nor the nine kinds of hell the ANZACS and USMC in particular went through in the Pacific theatre. Suicide attacks and beheadings don't impress us overmuch, and compared with the Japanese in the 1940's, Al Qaeda is really second-rate.

But now the sons and duaghters, grandsons and grand-daughters of the people who screamed "Tenno Banzai!" are on our side. They're building bridges, in more ways than one, and not casually slaughtering anyone in their way. We've been here before.

Finally - and as something of an afterthought, I'm afraid, we'll be supporting our mate, the USA. We're sending in troops for our own purely selfish reasons of course, out of a sense of responsibility and for practical geopolitical considerations "in our own national interest". But we're not averse to receiving the many expressions of gratitude that have already come from people in the USA. Expressions that no doubt will come in handy one of these days, maybe the next time the US agribusiness lobby tries to do something that will hurt us. We might even have made a few new friends and allies in rural America, people who otherwise might not have seen things our way.

Sometimes you can do well while doing good.



Footnotes
* Sun Tsu's "Art of War" Chapter 3, Para 2 :

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.

** For example, Stephen Decatur. I myself prefer G.K.Chesterton's take on the subject.

*** UK readers will know what I mean. For others, it's traditionally said when someone is attempting something next-to or actually impossible. "I'm building a Moon Rocket in my backyard." - "And the Best of British Luck!".

Cartoon courtesy of Nicholson of "The Australian" newspaper: www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au and used with permission

Mars on Ice

From the ABC :

A frozen sea surviving as blocks of pack ice may lie just beneath the surface of Mars, New Scientist magazine says, citing observations from Europe's Mars Express spacecraft.

Images from the high-resolution stereo camera on Mars Express show off structures called plates that look similar to ice formations near earth's poles.

These plates could indicate the first discovery of a large body of water beyond Mars' polar ice caps, the review says.

The team of researchers, led by John Murray of Britain's Open University, estimated the possible submerged ice sea to be about 800 by 900 kilometres in size and 45 metres deep on average.

The researchers say the evidence suggests that the plates are about 5 million years old.

They believe they are not just imprints left by ice that has now completely vanished.
[...]
The discovery was to be presented on Friday at the first Mars Express science conference in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

In their paper, the researchers traced a possible history for Mars's underground ice, saying it began with huge masses of ice floating in water that were later covered with volcanic ash, leaving the pack ice plates behind.

"If the reported hypothesis is true, then this would be a prime candidate landing site to search for possible extant life on Mars," said Brian Hynek, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in the United States.

Damn right it would! But not merely that, water in truly significant quantities - we're talking about a frozen ocean here - would make the terraforming of the joint entirely feasible with present-day technology.

OK, it may take a thousand years or so to implement, and Mars isn't a goer in the long-term as it's too small to hold a decent atmosphere for very long (geologically speaking), but if the hypothesis is confirmed, it would be a Big Deal. Time to send a drilling robot there, I'd say. With colonists to follow within a century, if they hit paydirt.

It's early days yet, the whole thing may well be a non-starter. But the payoff is so huge that it's worth reporting on, even if the probability is low.

Get Your Twangers Out

Back in the 70's, there was a children's TV programme in the UK called "Rainbow". But sometimes the dialogue was strictly Adults Only, and it's difficult to believe they got away with it at the time.

From Woolamaloo (not to be confused with the Sydney Surburb with a similar name), comes a few megabytes of extremely unsubtle double entendre. How unsubtle? So unsubtle that I daren't give any quotes, otherwise this blog would be banned by virtually every nanny-filter on the planet - and deservedly so.

Fault-Tolerant Customers

From an article by Paul Robinson in the Risks Digest :

I had sort of a revelation this afternoon when I think I finally figured what it was that I knew was a missing piece and the explanation.

And it also came to me as to why we have such a horrible problem with software reliability. Let me ask you to take a moment and consider how you started this morning.

Most likely, you crawled out of your cave, went down to the stream to bathe in the ice-cold water, came back and pulled the wheat out of the ground,stripped the chaff, then used either a mortar and pestle or a grindstone to make flour, then pulled some yeast from the pot to mix with it to make bread, then chopped wood, then used the wood to build a fire and baked the bread, then ground peanuts in the same mortar to make peanut butter, then spread it across the bread and ate it, because by now it was lunch, no?

No, most likely you got out of a bed, got up and took a hot shower in your indoor bathroom, poured boxed cereal into a bowl or made breakfast from materials you bought in a store, then cooked it on a range, or went to a restaurant and bought something to eat, then went on to work, and probably in this entire time you did nothing more strenuous than pick up the morning paper.

Also, you did not mine the ore for your utensils or forge the steel for them, nor did you build the automobile you drove to work....

Thus starts a well-thought-out screed on software reliability, re-usable components, and the culture that has led to "fault-tolerant customers" rather than "fault-tolerant software". Alas, if only it was the fault of one particular firm: instead it's the fault of the industry as a whole.

Anyway, even non-programmers, no, make that especially non-programmers should read the whole thing.

Where's the Kaboom?

There's supposed to be an Earth-Shattering Kaboom! - Marvin the Martian.

From Sam's Archive : How To Destroy the Earth.

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

But he provides a number of ways, anyway. Some require a bit of patience though.

Method: If by some insane chance, the expansion of the Sun into its Red Giant stage does not destroy the Earth (perhaps somebody moved the Earth out of the way in time), then there's still no need to fret. Protons, while incredibly stable, eventually decay like any other particle. Simply wait for a period of time of the order of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, and roughly half of the constituent particles of Earth will have decayed into positrons and pions. If that's still too much like a planet for you, you could wait for another 10³⁶ years, leaving only a quarter of the original Earth. Or wait even longer. Eventually there will be as little of Earth left as you wish.

Shuttle May Return to Space

From the ABC :

NASA has set May 15 as the launch date for the first shuttle mission since the Columbia accident two years ago.

"The challenge right now is closure of an awful lot of paper. The vehicle can't launch until all the paperwork is done," Bill Readdy, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, said.

"I know that sounds a little bit trivial," he said.

"But documentation of each and every thing we do is very important."

The board that investigated the fatal 2003 Columbia accident recommended NASA make 15 changes before resuming shuttle flights.
[...]
A special panel overseeing NASA's implementation of the accident board's findings says NASA has fulfilled seven recommendations fully and one conditionally.

The outstanding items will be considered at the board's planned final meeting at the end of March.

"We have every expectation that we are going to close all of them," Mr Readdy said.

"At this point, we don't see any show stoppers."

Walter Cantrell, who co-chairs NASA's Space Flight Leadership Council with Mr Readdy, says it has set all its standards a level or two higher than the oversight board.

"Obviously we're going to comply with what [they] are looking for. We're the ones that accept the risk, and we've set the standard where we think it should be," he said.

May 15 was chosen as the launch date for Discovery and its seven member crew because of lighting conditions and thermal issues related to the shuttle's launch and docking at the International Space Station.

NASA managers also set July 12 as the date for the second shuttle mission this year.

However, in case of an emergency aboard the Discovery, Mr Readdy says a second ship could be ready to be launched on a rescue mission as early as June 14.

As part of the safety upgrades implemented after the Columbia disaster, NASA wants to be able to shelter astronauts aboard the space station if their ship is too damaged to return to Earth.

Extra supplies will be flown to the space station on February 28.

I'm in two minds about this, the devil's in the details, details I know little about.
It's certainly good that NASA is thinking a bit more about "what do we do if things go wrong?" this time. But the basic problem is that the Space Shuttle is just too darned expensive and inefficient as a reliable space transportation system. It needs mending with a new one, even assuming that all the fatal kinks have been ironed out - which is a reasonable assumption, but not a proven fact.

Meanwhile, the only crewed space vehicle in development by the US is the CEV - the Crewed Exploration Vehicle. From Space.com :

Contractors are now busy at work on blueprinting CEV designs. NASA is expected to pick two prime teams later this year for preliminary CEV design and risk reduction flight test programs.

In 2008, the selected contractors will carry out unpiloted "boilerplate" CEV trial runs.

This risk reduction effort will lead NASA CEV project officials to select one contractor in 2008 to build the CEV for Spiral 1. More capable flight tests of the CEV are planned for 2011, also without crew. The first human flight of the CEV is slated for 2014.

So providing nothing whatsoever goes wrong, there's a 9-year gap that the Shuttle must fill. And at the end of the gap, the replacement's crewed section will most likely look more like a Soyuz or Apollo capsule, than a spaceplane - see below.



More graphics of various concepts by Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and NASA are at Project Constellation's CEV Concept Gallery. It looks like we're going back to the ballistic-capsule method for returning crew to Earth. On the other hand, the capsule is only part of the system as a whole. The CEV is most emphatically not primarily for getting into LEO (Low Earth Orbit) and returning, unlike the Shuttle. It's an Exploration vehicle, with many mission-specific modules, designed to go to the Moon and beyond.

Sometimes Back to the Past is Back to the Future.

The Unbelievers

Seen via Normblog, the Skeptics Circle.

The Skeptics' Circle is a biweekly carnival for bloggers who apply critical thought to questionable stories. Subjects include frequently repeated urban legends, quackery, pseudoscience, misinterpreted or denied history, analyses of misleading media, and any other articles or essays that fight misinformation with facts.

Lots of Bloggy goodness here. For example, at the very First Circle, there's an article on Holocaust Denial, as well as a particularly good Medblog, The Examining Room of Dr Charles. As some of my regular readers are in the Medical Profession (you know who you are), you may find this one particularly interesting. Though some of the particles are a bit icky.

But that's (black) comedy relief. It didn't take too much following of links to find this article on another aspect of Medicine.

If you are going to help someone with a terminal illness, you have to know their goals. Do they want to - no matter what - die at home? Do they want to fight until their last breath? Are they willing to trade some of their precious time to ensure that the time they do have left is quality time (example: would they rather take chemo to slow tumor growth, be sick most every day of the rest of their life, and live for about a year - or - quit chemo, feel good for a month or so, and die within six months)? Is the patient's only goal to walk his daughter down the aisle later this year even if that means that every day between now and then is lived in pain and discomfort? You don'™t know what the patient wants until you ask the questions and listen to the answers. Yes, you probably know what you would want if it was you, but the truth is that it is not you so your opinion is no longer important. It is your patient's life, so let them decide how it should be lived and help make that happen.

I think things like this make me a little impatient with much of Idiotarian Academe. There are plenty of, for want of a better term, Adults, out there who have to think about things like this every day. It's not some hypothetical, nor an abstract problem. And it's not just people who work in Intensive Care Units, nor Hospices or Oncology wards. There would be few General Practitioners who wouldn't at some stage of their careers have had an icy hollow in the pit of their stomach when doing a routine examination of a patient for some minor complaint, and unexpectedly finding one of Nature's Lethal Little Jokes.

If I was pondering what would be the ethical, the just thing to do in a difficult situation where thousands of lives were at stake - such as the Iraq War - I'd trust an Oncology Nurse far more than any Academic, no matter how widely-read.

In some ways it's ironic the career path that I've chosen. One of the reasons I didn't enter Medicine was because I'd had a good hard think about what I'd do the first time my incompetence, exhaustion, or sheer imperfection due to being human ended up with a patient dead. Because it happens, it's almost certain to happen. People, no matter how good, make mistakes. Sometimes there's not enough evidence to be sure of a conclusion, you have to make an informed guess, and sometimes you get it wrong.

Now when that means you lose a little money on the stock market or whatever, that's too bad. But in medicine, it means that someone may die.

Anyone not prepared to take the consequences of their own failure, to shake themselves off and move on to the next case, so as to do the most good, should never take up the practice of Medicine.

As a student just leaving High School, I had a good think, and decided I'd be unable to live with myself. So I took up Physics, hoping to get into Astronomy, before Computer Science got me hooked (but that's another story).

As for Ironic? Well, there must be several thousand people whose lives directly or indirectly depend on whether the work I did, sometimes as long as 20 years ago, was good enough. So far I've been lucky. The two people whose deaths are directly attributable to work I did were enemy pilots, killed as the result of war. And I'm told there's more than a handful saved by SAR (Search And Rescue) Algorithms I came up with when I realised that there were similarities with certain well-known and solved problems in Anti-Submarine Warfare search patterns.

But compared to, say, Ambulance drivers, or even Pathology Lab technicians, I've got it easy, and count my blessings.

Computer Security - A Visual Lesson