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 Sunday, July 13, 2003
I've been trying to follow the Tour de France. CBS had miserable coverage today but luckily I get OLN which has ahd much better. They actually show the race, as opposed to CBS which showed very little. While Lance is a great story, I have been following Tyler Hamilton. He cracked his collarbone in two places early on in the Tour, about a week ago. He is not only still competing, he is less than 2 minutes off the pace of Armstrong!! I broke my collarbone in two places and I was stuck on my back on the reclining sofa for almost 2 weeks. He is racing in the most grueling physical major event of the year. Freakin' unbelievable. Here is his race diary.. Or read what another bicycling afficianado said. Hamilton should get some sort of special jersey for this, especially since several of the sprinters just quit the tour because they did not want to deal with the mountains. Wimps. 11:35:14 PM 
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Defense Lawyers Balking At Participating in Military Tribunals. The New York Times has an excellent article outlining the hesitancy of civilian defense lawyers to participate in military tribunal... [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]
This is the aspect of these tribunals that disgusts me. How are they going to be any different from the 'sham' trials that we ridiculed the USSR and China about? Taking citizens of other countries and prosecuting them in a closed court, possible providing the death penalty will result in abuses. That is one reason why our Constitution and Bill of Rights do so much to limit governmental power. There is no apparent limit in these proceedings.
Check out Calpundit,tribunals which has a table comparing these tribunals with those of other others, such as England and South Africa. Trying terrorists in Britain appears humane compared to these tribunals. I also love the fact that even if a defendant is found innocent in one of the tribunals, that does not mean he is set free. We can still hold him for as long as we, meaning "our" elected officials decide to.
The fact that a man charged in these tribunals with a potential death sentence against him may not be allowed to know all the evidence against him sickens me. Not even his defense attorney would know all the evidence, if the prosecution decides otherwise. Only the military prosecutor and the panel would know. We tried some the worst mass murderers in the 20th century at Nuremberg in an open courtroom, with the ability to know all the evidence. How fearful we are of such little men. The guys at Gitmo can't hold a candle to the murderers of the 3rd Reich. We did not change our procedures for trying criminals just to make it easier to convict them, even if we knew they were guilty of heinous crimes. We are allowing our republic and its laws to be distorted by a group of men who appear to have little real regard to what made America great. 11:02:27 PM
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Scaling Echo: P2P and Cached Feeds.. The syndicated blogosphere will reach 300 million feeds in 3 years.
This is very early in the adoption of RSS feeds. Very few publishers. Even fewer readers. How will this change?[a klog apart]
Okay, I was following this and interested in his extrapolations until I got to this part.:
Each reader may consume 1000 feeds.
We'll also grow in our ability to read them.
Newsreaders will help us filter and prioritize our reading.
- Security filters (I required special authorization to read these posts)
- Social filters (people who read this post also liked these)
- Social network proximity (rank higher posts from family, friends, colleagues, FOAFs, my bowling team)
- Commercial spam filters (black lists and bayesian filters)
- Manual parameter filters (like the ones in most email clients)
- Categorizers and Threaders (these posts from different sources belong together)
- Pre-processors (these posts in German are interesting to you in English)
- Content filters (flagging or filtering-in/out "offensive" pictures or phrases)
- Geographic proximity filters (these posts are by people in your neighborhood, those posts are about events near you)
So our capacity to follow more feeds will also grow by at least one to two orders of magnitude. Most people follow under 100 feeds in their newsreaders now. I follow nearly 1000, 50 religiously, 200 regularly. But all of them are searchable on my hard drive and they all pop-up in a balloon when they update.
And we don't have useful filters now. When the tools start to do more, the number of feeds consumed per reader will grow.
1000 feeds. I hardly have time to deal with those I do read (about 160). If I miss a day or two, I have way too many items to read to catch up. The filtering would have to awfully good. I am not a fan of filtering, at least for me. Then I only get to read what I know I want to read. The serendipity of finding something I was not expecting is gone. An example would be staying on top of the literature. No one can read all the journals, so you have services filter the articles, sending you only those on say cell receptors. Great. You then get a list of articles that you still have no time to read.
In a creative environment, losing serendipity is a big deal. Many great ideas come from the friction between the expected and unexpected, from ideas that are tossed over the transom. How is my filter supposed to know what I will find interesting? Perhaps if they act like my filters of today, which are people. I subscribe to people who are connectors, who get information from a wide range of people. They hit me with a wide range of viewpoints. I 'know' them and get surprised when they add unexpected things. I have not met a computer filter yet that can tell me what I will need to read, before I know what it even is. I think that the blogosphere will still work by a massively connected group of people. Many work as connectors, moving data and information around, between and through. It is their weird human ability that makes them worthwhile, because they connect us to the creators.
If a computer filter can perform the same process, then there will probably not be nearly as many blogs worthwhile as suggested in this article. There may be 300,000,000 blogs but without the need for connectors to make the connections, only the small percentage that actually create new content, ideas, etc. will be worthwhile. this will be much less that 300 million. Personally, I would rather trust humans to make the connections that computerized filters. 10:17:13 PM
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Vox Populi
Longtime reader Joe Cerro sends along an interesting item. The Wall St. Journal Europe recently had an article (subscribers only) on a European survey commissioned by the drug industry. The results were. . .interesting, in a sort of hand-wringing way.
The part I most enjoyed was a question about who gets credit for new medicines being discovered and sold. The drug industry gets a good vote there, which is a relief. But the governments involved made a strong showing, too, as did (hold on for this one) pharmacists, of all people. That one puzzles me quite a bit - perhaps people have more of a memory of compounding pharmacies there?
59% of Europeans aren't buying the argument that price controls are bad for the drug business. At one point, respondents had to rate 35 assertions for their believability, and the price-controls-affect-research one was at the bottom. (I'd like to know what the other more persuasive ones were. . ."My alarm clock makes the sun rise," maybe?)
This is a real problem for the pharma companies. I doubt if this survey told people too much that they didn't know (or strongly suspect,) but it's worrying, just the same. The worry I have is that it's too easy to believe some of the things the European public believes. (It feels good to think that some of these things are true! Why not just run with 'em?)
What I'd like to know is what the answers would be for the same survey, given here in the US. It wouldn't surprise me if the drug industry hasn't run that one already. (A control group - we love control groups.) What percentage of Americans think that pharmacists deserve credit for the discovery of new drugs? More unnervingly, what percentage think that legally mandated low, low prices wouldn't have an effect on research? (Now that one I know is being polled. . .!) [Corante: In the pipeline]
Of course, polls are notorious for showing the stupidity of people. And people seem to believe the stupidist things. So we have oil tankers just over the horizon waiting for the price of oil to go up, or people who just know that WMD have been discovered in Iraq. 47% of the people in the US believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. Forty percent think that creationism should be taught in public schools INSTEAD of evolution. In Europe, 82% believe that humans descended from other animals. What these polls really show is that when people do not really understand a situation, they fall back on safe points of view. Most people do not have the slightest idea of what evolution is. So why should we really care about the results of this poll? It shows how much education must be done. As does the poll on drugs. People will believe the things that are simple and/or benefit them. Why shouldn't they believe a politician who says he can keep prices on medicine low and that those drug companies are just cheating scoundrels? 9:56:44 PM
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For a very good read, by those most affected by the Bush Doctrine, check out this from the Spring 2003 issue of Parameters, the United States Army's Senior Professional Journal, published by the Army War College. Here is how Parameters describes itself:Parameters, a refereed journal of ideas and issues, provides a forum for the expression of mature professional thought on the art and science of land warfare, joint and combined matters, national and international security affairs, military strategy, military leadership and management, military history, ethics, and other topics of significant and current interest to the US Army and Department of Defense. It serves as a vehicle for continuing the education and professional development of USAWC graduates and other senior military officers, as well as members of government and academia concerned with national security affairs The Spring issue, reviewed on February 7, 2003, came out before the war in Iraq started, yet contained these prescient words from the editor discussing the article on the Bush Doctrine:Jeffery Record examines the major tenets of the current Administration's security strategy and its approach to the use of force, the Bush Doctrine. Record presents an enlightening assessment of the doctrine's strengths and weaknesses within the context of a prospective war with Iraq. He analyzes the Administration's case against Iraq, determining "by virtue of the combination of destructiveness and invulnerability to deterrence . . . such a threat demands an unprecedented response." He then presents five observations on the validity of the Bush Doctrine, concluding that the Administration suffers from a case of strategic myopia and that no matter how convincing the case is made for an attack on Iraq, preemption as a declaratory doctrine when used generically invites catastrophe. Looks like that strategic myopia is becoming a real problem. This article logically and methodically examines the Bush Doctrine, what it is and why it came into existence. The article is full of some very nice points that should be part of any discussion. It states that:The heart of the threat is al Qaeda, not Iraq, and a US war against Iraq inevitably will divert strategic attention and military resources away not only from the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and the destruction of al Qaeda, but also from America's still unacceptably weak homeland defenses. Will having most of our military tied down in Iraq hamper our ability to really go after Islamic terrorists? I believe so. Distractions such as Iraq will make it easier for others to attack. I particularly liked its discussion of preemptive war, which has international sanction, and preventative war, which does not. The war against Iraq was not preemptive, there was no immediate threat of direct attack. It was more of a preventative war, where we attack another because we are powerful right now and they are not. We have to get them before they develop nuclear weapons 'sometime' in the future. The intellectual motive behind our attack on Iraq is not so different than Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was. They hoped that attacking us before we became more of a direct threat to them, would prevent terrible consequences fro Japan's burgeoning hegemony. Boy, were they wrong. They set the stage for American hegemony. I wonder if our attack on Iraq has also planted the seeds for the collapse of our hegemony? 5:41:32 PM
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Analysis: Anatomy of a Quack-Mire... (Jim Lobe). Analysis: Anatomy of a Quack-Mire... (Jim Lobe) [Common Dreams]
The problem with all of this is not whether Bush did or did not have intelligence worth spit. It is that he based changing our foreign policy, creating the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive attacks on other countries, on such flimsy data. If you are going to attack another country, when they are no direct threat to you, it had better be based on the best information, not the information that fits your fears best. The world backed us on the Cuban Missile Crisis becaused we DID have the data and finally showed it. Now, we did not have the data and still wanted the world to back us. In the future, if we actually do need their help, and we will, why should they believe us? Lying and misleading, believing your own propaganda is a sure path to oblivion. The first example of the Bush Doctrine was built on sand. It will take much more backfilling than simple platitude and exclamations of 'Just move on.' 5:10:33 PM
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Oil price surges on storm fears. Oil prices climb to a two-month high on fears a tropical storm could disrupt production in the Gulf of Mexico. [BBC News | Business | World Edition]
There was an article in today's Seattle Times from the Washington Post discussing the problem in Louisiana, with the delta sinking, bringing in salt water and disrupting the flow of oil. A proposed solution would cost at least $14 billion when completed 20 or so years from now. There is a very good chance a tropical storm could take out the oil and gas facilities before then. No wonder the oil markets are shaky. The article said a 2 week disruption would push oil prices to over $2 very quickly. One hopes that Homeland Security is also working really hard to protect this area from unnatural events. But I guess higher oil prices will increase inflation and prevent the onslought of deflation, right? Somehow I do not think that this scenario would really be helpful. 3:55:03 PM
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Kensington Wifi Finder. 
Work Anywhere!
Your life on the road just got a lot easier. With the first and only WiFi detector on the market today, you no longer need to cross your fingers as you wait for your notebook to boot up. Just press a button and the Kensington WiFi Finder lets you know if your location is "hot"...instantly. No software or computer needed. What could be easier I MUST get one of these.
via Bopuc on IRC By Joichi Ito jito@neoteny.com. [Joi Ito's Web]
Something like this couldbecome very useful in the future. I wonder if they make a key ring version? 3:42:57 PM
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