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Monday, March 3, 2003
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What are the consequences of illegal crypto for criminals in an Ashcroftian state? Mark Rasch thinks the Justice Department's expansion of authority as outlined in the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 have nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with a police state.
The more we move to a police state (and there are really chilling things in the DSEA-2003), the more it seems that the administration and congress have given an easy victory to the terrorists.
7:12:35 AM 
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A conversation with Fernando pushed me to finish a John McPhee book that has been hiding on the shelf for too long. McPhee has a wonderful way with words and I encountered this sentence...
Spaniards in the sixteenth century saw an ocean moving south through a palimpsest of bayous and distributary streams in forested paludal basins.
hmmm ... palimpsest, The dictionary suggests it is a manuscript, nominally papyrus, that has been written on more than once, with earlier writing incompletely erased and ofen legible. McPhee's choice of this word is so elegant here - something that reflects its own history.
Of course we have the web which inspires a bit of searching turns up a project to recover a rather significant old text using image processing.
6:03:59 AM
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The Hooker Telescope at Mt Wilson is one of the first great reflectors using turn of the (last) century technology. In the past few years it has been upgraded with adaptive optics and you can buy time on this instrument for a mere $2700 a night (of course you can and should buy insurance against poor seeing adding to your bill).
6:03:03 AM
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Steve Cisler has several interesting notes in his blog - a conference on Mexico as a developing nation and a reference to the IICD.
If you have any interest in the social aspects of computing in developing nations you should take a look.
6:02:43 AM
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And finally a note from Jessica
The weather today was especially beautiful. I spent the day reading in the park. Cormac McCarthy. He's sort of like a romance novel, just gossip to read, but it's very beautiful imagery. There were two little girls running around unattended and they were picking the tiny white flowers from the ground and handing them to people in the park with some sense of ceremony. It was interesting to imagine being them. They were young enough that approaching strangers was daunting and old enough to know it. But it seemed to be really exciting to them to hand out flowers.
I was reading and my bag was behind me. At one point I heard someone walk up to me and turned around to see one of the girls there, she looked like she was sneaking up on me, so I turned back around and kept reading. Just now (hours later) as I am doing some errands on line, I found a tiny white flower in my bag that she must have put there. Its a lovely gesture.
So go out and commit some small act of anonymous kindness today!
6:02:21 AM
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