Disapproval Numbers

What an image! Bush only has a majority approval in Texas (not surprising), Alabama, Nebraska, Wyoing, Idaho, Utah and North Dakota. Makes you wonder how he could ever have been elected. Honestly. How?  9:18:51 PM    

Baltar And Six

Okay, I've been crunching on this Baltar/Six thing for awhile, and I have a somewhat arcane explanation but one that seems to fit what we have seen and could open up some real possibilities. It started from the movie, when Caprica is being blown to smithereens. Baltar and Six are in his apartment when a shock-wave hits the room, destroying everything, including, seemingly, the two characters. Up to that point, Six was a real character who could interact with others. Yet later we see Baltar with only a few scratches and now Six can only interact with him. How come Baltar was not more severely injured? He should be dead. Why can Six only interact with Baltar? And, how come the only time a 'real' Six showed up on Galactica (Six Degrees of Separation) Baltar's Six disappeared from his consciousness?

Could Baltar have developed the same sort of technology that allowed consciousness to be transfered to another body that the Cylons are supposed to have? So, when he died in the apartment, his consciousness was transferred to a Baltar clone. But, because there was also a Cylon transference occurring at the same time, something not expected, Six was also transferred along with Baltar into a new body. She is now disconnected from the Cylons, free to progress on her own and develop her own agenda. She really is in his head.

Because of the normal sort of communications that can occur between similar Cylon clones, Baltar's Six had to 'hide' when her Cylon clone showed up. Once that Cylon was gone, she could return.

We know that Baltar was a computer genius. Why would he not be able to have developed similar technology that the Cylons had for transferring consciousness? If so, wouldn't that be some interesting scene in an upcoming episode. Baltar is killed, definitely killed on the ship. Blackout. Then he opens his eyes in a room in Caprica! He would have some interesting explaining to do.  8:53:13 PM    

Lazy, dumb programmers that are nothing of the sort. Philip Lenssen explains why programmers should be lazy and dumb, although of course he doesn't mean either of those terms in the way we usually do.... [Joho the Blog]

This is a nice distillation of how many creative scientists work also. Lazy, because we want to find new tools to make our lives easier (think Lee Hood, Marv Caruthers and their confederates who created the DNA synthesis and DNA sequencing industries because they wanted to be able to synthesize and sequence DNA)(Disclaimer - Lee was the one who introduced me to immunology 30 years ago at CalTech and I was a post-doc in Marv's lab).

And almost all great scientists are dumb, in the fashion as described. Particularly in biology, where life so often throws us a curve. If we act too smart, we will miss the important clues that lead us to the answer.  8:48:29 AM    

Sorting is hard. According to a front page story by Kirk Johnson in the NY Times, the Denver airport is giving up on its dream of automatically sorting and mangling, um, managing luggage. Why the front page? Apparently because the story illuminates some important themes. Even before Johnson gets to the appealing Rube Goldberg elements of the system, he points to a more difficult and more significant problem: Complex, centrally managed systems don't work so well: Back then, the big-brained mainframe doing it all from command central was the model of high tech. Today the very idea of it sounds like a cold-war-era... [Joho the Blog]

Nice discussion of one of the great failures of centralized programming of complex systems. The current decentralized apporaches seem to work much better.  8:37:57 AM    

JOURNAL: Rapid Innovation and Infrared IEDs. The rapid innovation of the Iraqi open source insurgency is yielding improvements in guerrilla technology. In the words of one British Army bomb disposal officer, "These guys have picked up in two years what it took the IRA a quarter-century... [Global Guerrillas]

Why I love reading this:

This is another aspect of global guerrilla math: our deployed innovation is measured in years and theirs in months. -OR- that a $1.2 billion program for IED counter-measures could be trumped by a $10 burglar alarm sensor.

Until we learn how to run an army with similar approaches, we will not have great success in this sort of battlefield. A smaller army with better high tech tools (what Rumsfeld wants) is not the answer. It is creative, 'low tech' approaches that will succeed. We need a way for the guys on the front-line to weave their creativity into the mix. Much as they have come up with creative ways to provide armor for vehicles, they would be able to more rapidly respond, in more efficient ways than they are probably allowed to now.  8:33:03 AM