Why We Will Face Severe Global Warming

OK, this post is going to be about global warming. I have my flak jacket on and I can take it. Bring it on. Unlike just about everyone I know who talks about this issue, I HAVE DONE THE MATH. So there.

As a student at the Naval Postgraduate School from 1989-1992, I took a mandatory class for my major on remote sensing of the Earth's environment. We spent some weeks of that course (OC3520 - which now seems to be called OC3522) going over the detailed evidence for and against global warming. The result at the time (1990) was that the statistics were inconclusive - global warming was then a theory and more data needed to be collected to find the truth. The lack of data gave rise to NASA's Mission to Planet Earth, a series of five satellites which collected the necessary data in the mid and late 1990s. Substantial new core samples were taken in both polar regions. The supercomputer centers at the national laboratories (including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where I worked before moving to Australia) were turned from a primary mission of nuclear blast modeling (since the Cold War had ended) and put onto the modeling of the Earth's climate. I used to van pool to Livermore with the scientists doing that work. Their results, and confirmations from Russia and Europe, have shown conclusively both that global warming is occurring and that greenhouse gas emissions created by humans are the primary culprit.

The science on global warming has coalesced only in the last five years. Anyone who says that there is still substantial debate on the existence of a trend of global warming and that human pollution is largely responsible is no longer up to date. Debate remains on many smaller details, most of them related to the rate of temperature increase and what to do about it.

The scientific community is as united today on global warming and the need to urgently reduce greenhouse gas emissions as they are on, say, evolution. That is, many scientists still debate the details and a few even object entirely, but the base concepts are quite mainstream.

Today I saw a recorded interview with Sen. James M. Inhofe (Republican from Oklahoma and chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works) who stated that the entire global warming "scare" was simply a "hoax". Later I found a floor speech by Inhofe on a Climate Change Update, in which he lays out those views in detail. Now, this guy HAS NOT done the math and possibly doesn't know anybody who has, and yet he chairs the U.S. Senate's environmental committee? Inhofe and powerful people like him simply will not listen. That is why the United States, as the world's largest contributor to global warming, will not sign the Kyoto Protocols. That is why Gore's movie is falling on deaf ears. President George Bush has even stated that he won't see The Inconvenient Truth. In short, that is why global warming will devastate a substantial percentage of the world's biodiversity in our lifetimes and we will sit back and watch it happen. No amount of talking can cure an ignoramus.

Part of the problem is that climate change is treated as a split issue in the popular press, but not in scientific journals. This article in Science, for example, describes a study of 928 peer-reviewed scientific abstracts which agreed that global warming was occuring and that humans were responsible. Contrast that with Google Trends, which shows no increase in Internet searches for the topic for the last couple of years. People, it would seem, are happily following the tragedy of the commons right into the future. It is not that humans aren't predictable, they are all too predictable. They (we!) simply don't seem to want to face the consequences of our actions. But we will, like it or not.

Even if the popular press pulled their head out and the US Government decided to support Kyoto, we still live in a country too spoiled to change rapidly.

I am not just talking about doing something. My family has planted trees and bushes in the last four houses we have owned. We installed solar hot water heating in one house and are investigating options for doing it in our new house. Neither I nor my wife drive much - we work from home. We grow some of our own herbs and have started planting vegetables. We recycle as much as we are allowed to. We use air conditioning as little as one or two days per month in summer. What are you doing?

Alas, my neighbor just cut down 69 trees. I can't undo the damage and can't even get him to discuss why that might not be a great idea. Nor can I compete.

Suck for the Cure

The vacuum cleaner company Oreck and The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation are sponsoring Clean for the Cure, a fund raiser for breast cancer research. In short, you buy a pink vacuum from Oreck and $50 goes to the charity. Naturally, my wife bought one when we needed a new vacuum.

Now I am stuck with a hot pink vacuum cleaner.

I would have gladly bought a green one and given $50 to the Komen Foundation if asked. I wasn't asked. *sigh*

Microsoft and RDF

Microsoft once supported RDF as a standard. What would the Semantic Web have looked like if the browser wars had not diverted that early enthusiasm? Here's the proof, a bag given to Eric Miller at the W3C in the early days of the standard development:

RailsConf 2006

I just returned from RailsConf 2006, the first official international Rails conference. It was a bust, sort of and great, sort of. First conferences are just hard to make right.

I like Rails and have spent about a month coding with it. That put me in advance of many of the sessions in terms of lessons learned. Still, all the right people were there and the conversations were worth while. The keynotes were pretty great. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to keep me in Chicago past the middle of Day Two.

No Fluff, Just Stuff founder Jay Zimmerman helped organize the conference but did not assist in program selection. It might have been better if he did. Day One talks failed to impress me at all (with the notable exception of Adam Keys' talk entitled, "AC/DC, Stravinsky & Rails", which gets points for originality of thought). I poked at Adam during his talk a bit because he inadvertantly projected his notes beforehand and I read them off the screen. Sorry, Adam, if you are reading this. I couldn't help myself. You still got the laugh you were after, perhaps more so, so no harm done.

I only learned something really valuable in one session (Justin Gehtland's talk on Streamlined). Scott Raymond's Day Two talk on lessons learned from a Rails deployment was interesting, especially his concept that software development methodologies ignore the third leg of Vitruvius' Triangle, venustras, but that had little to do with Rails.

Martin Fowler, always an interesting speaker, gave a solid keynote on the first evening. He noted the failure of software systems to deliver every feature demanded (what I would call a "100% solution") and actively promoted smaller, more focused systems like Rails (which Martin labeled "postmodernist software"). It would seem that we have officially entered the era of opinionated software and have buried bloatware. The king is dead, long live the king! We certainly don't need another EJB in the world. Martin went on to opine that the combination of different patterns written in different speciality platforms will be important. Since Rails has yet to hit large enterprises, it will be interesting to see how this is handled in practice. There is room for both research and trial in that field!

Paul Graham gave the after-dinner keynote on Friday. It was interesting to see him in person. He was intense, smart and very, very worried. He was preparing his keynote while the band set up, stealing all the attention and making lots of noise. I took his picture, which he noticed. I told him, "I didn't take your picture because you are famous, I took it because you are famous, rich and successful and yet still look miserable." He complained about the band and opened his keynote with the story. That's my life - subtly influencing the rich and famous. It is a fun, if questionable, niche. Paul's keynote was entitled, "The Power of the Marginal" and suggested that innovation ceases once you become well known. It was well written and well presented, but sad. I felt like offering him a job afterward.

Why the Lucky Stiff and the Thirsty Cups played the first night. Why is brilliant, but insecure. He peppered his hard rock-'n-roll with Flash vignettes and obfuscated Ruby code. He has so much talent and seems to have built his sound effects devices himself. One of the attendees told me he once saw him recompile a Linux kernel device driver for his gear *during a concert*. That rocks, regardless of the music.

Comparing Mapquest and Google Maps

I have used MapQuest for a long while (in Internet terms), but thought I would give Google Maps a try. The result? An extra hour from Columbus, OH to Chicago, an extra hour from my parents house to Columbus and an extra hour from my house to my parents. Yuck! I think they took the Beta marker off a bit soon.

Both routes and times on route were off. I can generally beat or match MapQuest times as it is. Perhaps the Google Maps time algorithm thinks I'm traveling with my wife and kids...

Jim Hendler to Move to RPI in 2007

Professor Jim Hendler, Director of the University of Maryland's MIND Lab where I work will be moving to RPI in the summer of 2007. The press release is here. Congratulations, Jim!

I will move on from the MINDSWAP project when Jim leaves.

Secret of the Code

B and I saw The Da Vinci Code movie tonight. Unlike seemly most others, I thoroughly enjoyed it. But then, we had both read the book and therein lies the movie's secret.

Ron Howard is a very, very good director. The photography was superb and Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou did solid jobs as the leads. Most criticism has stemmed from the inability to condense the weighty novel onto the big screen. My supposition is that they didn't really try.

The movie would be confusing and fragmented to those who had never read the book. Then again, over 45 million people have read the book. Isn't that a market in its own right? I suggest that the movie was aimed at the proven audience who had read the book, who understood it already and who would like to add Hollywood-style visuals and special effects to their experience of the story. That certainly worked for me.

Two Types of Yoga

My friend Mark recently told me that there are two types of yoga. I present them here for your edification:

Yoga from India:

Yoga from Horsetralia:

I wish (Oh, how I wish!) that I could take credit for these, but they were forwarded from Mark via a South African mailing list. Unfortunately, they were ungoogleable, so I served them. We wouldn't want them to be lost to posterity! Please comment if you know who should get attribution.

New Semantic Web Activity Lead at W3C

Eric Miller has announced his imminent departure from the World Wide Web Consortium as Semantic Web Activity Lead. Eric has been Activity Lead for the last five years and was instrumental in producing the core technical infrastructure standards (RDF, RDFS and OWL). He has recently directed the formation of working groups to work on rules interchange and life sciences, as well as continuing SemWeb deployment work. The 2006 Semantic Web Activity Proposal summarizes the state of the Activity and future plans. Eric is rumored to be heading for a more hands-on development role somewhere in the SemWeb space.

Ivan Herman will take over the role of Activity Lead in July.

I am pleased to call both men friends and wish them well as they change roles.

OWL-DL Ontology of Software Engineering Concepts

I have created a simple OWL-DL ontology of software engineering concepts and posted them on my UQ site.

• OWL-DL ontology of software engineering concepts (Source and OWLDoc)
• Example of use of the above ontology of software engineering concepts (Source and OWLDoc)

A Big Week for the SemWeb

This has been a busy week for the Semantic Web. Some of items of interest:

TopQuadrant has released a new SemWeb ontology editor (implemented as an Eclipse plug-in) called Top Braid Composer. There is a free evaluation, but a commercial license. The differentiator from Protégé and SWOOP seems to be a greater attempt at visualization.

The Semantic Web and Multimedia Group, Universita' Politecnica delle Marche, Italy, released version 0.4 of DBin, a P2P/SemWeb project for "building Semantic Web communities". The project is under the GPL.

Mark Birbeck has posted his presentation on RDFa for XTech 2006. RDFa (formerly known as the less Googleable RDF/A) is an up-and-coming way to represent metadata in XML, especially XHTML, documents.

Alistair Miles has posted his paper on the requirements for the standardization for SKOS.

Tim Berners-Lee has made public his final draft report on the MIT-W3C DAML program. In the conclusion, he expresses his ideas for the conditions necessary to make the Semantic Web a reality. I think he was pretty honest about the challenges.

State of the SemWeb According to Google Trends

Weeble introduced me to Google Trends, a new way of tracking trends of Web search terms.

A search for "Semantic Web" yielded some interesting and surprising results. Firstly, the search term activity seemed to have peaked a couple of years ago. Perhaps that is not surprising since that was when RDF and OWL were standardized. Secondly, the regions which lead the pack in searching for the term are:

1. Korea
2. Greece
3. Iran
4. Ireland
5. Singapore
6. India
7. Austria
8. Malaysia
9. Taiwan
10. Hong Kong

Now, I knew that the Europeans were ahead of the US, so Greece, Ireland and Austria didn't surprise me, nor did the US's absence. Korea, Singapore, India, Malaysia, Taiwan and Hong Kong are all well-known high-techers, so that's OK. But Iran?

Big Brother Should Be Watched

Unsurprisingly, the news media and the US government continue to misunderstand the central issue in the domestic spying revelations I mentioned in Should We Trust Big Brother?. The real story is protecting the civil rights of individual citizens from abuses, not everyday business-as-usual.

The news media have focused on whether or not Americans object to the NSA trolling their telephone records (they don't, by a 65% majority) and the likely prospects of General Michael Hayden to be confirmed as the next head of the CIA.

However, consider the following scenario, where innocent people may be harmed for political gain.

By all reports, including the President's, the NSA has gained access to telephone call records in an attempt to track who terrorists are speaking to in the US. Let's say that a terrorist on a watch list calls a dry cleaner in New York City. Let's further stipulate that the dry cleaner is a legitimate business who is not part of any illegal activities. Lots of other people will use that dry cleaner and some will make calls to them. The NSA will not be able to assume that the dry cleaner is legitimate and so will have to analyze the second degree of contacts. Did the dry cleaner make or receive any calls from known criminals or terrorist suspects?

Perhaps our dry cleaner also services a local politician and his family. Perhaps one of them has made a call to a 1 900 service, or a brothel or just happened to use the same dry cleaner of a terrorist suspect.

Could our leaders resist the urge to use this knowledge for political gain? Surely, some will. History tells us unabashedly that some will not. The theory of six degrees of separation suggests that we are more closely connected to each other than we may think. Should such closeness be used against us, by default and without legislative or judicial oversight?

Thus, without a carefully crafted system of checks and balances (to include warrants), it is my strong opinion that American civil liberties will be damaged by the current system.

I have no objection to the NSA being allowed to do its job! I do, however, believe strongly that trust is earned and not to be given lightly. Trust, say the Russians, but verify. I have yet to hear a single voice raised to explain why the NSA should not be required to get a warrant to access, much less follow, the trail of information available in telephone records.

Should We Trust Big Brother?

USA Today reported today that the NSA is keeping a large database of telephone call records for US citizens, with the raw data being supplied by the large telecom carriers. No surprise there. Still, here are some thoughts on the subject:

One one hand, the limits of current technology would suggest that the NSA would probably need such a database in order to query it for the specific call records they want to find, such as those related to Al Queda, their associates or their correspondents. I can think of no better way to solve the problem, especially when queries may be made during investigations well subsequent to the calls themselves.

On the other hand, I can understand the concerns of citizens not wishing the government to attain, or retain, this information at all. Is there to be no expectation of privacy for any electronic communication? That would engender a great change to the way Americans conduct themselves, especially given the trend to use so many new forms of electronic communications channels.

On the gripping hand, can we trust the NSA and the Administration (any Administration) not to yield to temptation? If we allow them to collect and hold that information, can we trust them not to mine the data? Does not the memory of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover suggest that we should not trust George Bush quite that much?

In any society, there are those who will gladly violate the rights of others just because an authority figure told them to. Just where are the checks and balances on executive power under that scenario?

I have to object. On balance, it appears that President Bush is willing to trade a resonable expectation of electronic privacy for a better chance (chance!) of catching a small number of terrorists. I am not. The public good is better served by refusing to become a police state.

For Fathers Only

A friend who prefers to remain anonymous has started a blog on fatherhood. I give him credit for his tagline:

"I used to think I could be a better dad. Then I reset the bar and reminded myself, 'Some animals eat their young.'"

Drawing Grass

Jonathan just pointed me to the Grass Tutorial, showing how an artist used Adobe Photoshop to draw grass. It is definately worth a look by anyone interested in seeing how digital art is progressing.

Physicists Get Water to Flow Uphill

Physicists working at the University of Oregon's Linke Group have harnessed the Leidenfrost effect to make water flow uphill using only heat and a carefully-shaped surface. The BBC has the story and a video.

The plan is to harness this effect to automatically cool microchips.

Just when I thought all interesting physics was non-classical...

USB Memory Devices and Mac OS X

For many years (about 13) I had a low user id number on my various Unix boxes of 112. This was a hangover from the old days of Sun OS 4.1.3 when anything under 100 was restricted. I carried this uid from Sun OS to Solaris to Linux to Mac OS X because I routinely used NFS (which operates on the uid) and didn't want my systems administrators to have to change my uid on all file servers.

I finally made the switch to a high uid (above 500 - the new standard) when I bought a PowerMac G5 last year. That made switching the files from my Powerbook G4 much more difficult, but not impossible. I thought I was done.

Then something strange happened. In a seemingly unrelated series of events, my three USB memory sticks started to leak capacity. A particular 1 GB stick would only hold 40 MB, even though there were no files on it! I found the problem today. My old uid had raised its head one last time.

Mac OS X segments files on removable media by - you guessed it - uid. The file structure on the 1 GB USB stick had these files on it:

[macaw]$ file .*
.:                        directory
..:                       sticky directory
.DS_Store:                data
.TemporaryItems:          directory
.Trashes:                 directory
._.TemporaryItems:        AppleDouble encoded Macintosh file
._.Trashes:               AppleDouble encoded Macintosh file

The .TemporaryItems and .Trashes directory were full of files owned by my old uid - which my new uid had no right to delete. The solution was to use sudo on the command line to simply remove those directories and their associated files (including the top-level ._.* files). Ejecting the device and remounting it showed a comfortable 976.1 MB.

Kowari is Forking. Welcome, Mulgara!

The unofficial Kowari fork is about to become official. The new name will be Mulgara, another Australia marsupial which is remarkably similar to a Kowari :)

The Mulgara Web site is partially up. The domain is obviously registered and an Apache server is responding on a Fedora OS. Check back soon for more news!

Andrae's Subversion repository is rumored to be opening for public submissions shortly, as well. In the meantime, source and binary code for Kowari "version 1.2" are available.

It will be a relief to get this project back on track given the substantial customer interest expressed since January. I look forward to participating in the Mulgara project.

New WordNet in RDF

The latest version of Princeton University's WordNet has been made available in RDF by the WordNet Task Force of the W3C's Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group. The new RDF version is here.

This conversion is based on the newest RDF/OWL Representation of WordNet document, now being considered for First Working Draft status.

China and Asymmetrical Warfare

Victor Corpus, a former Phillipine armed forces chief of intelligence, wrote an interesting peice for the Asia Times Online entitled, "If it comes to a shooting war ..." about a potential shooting war between the US and China. There were ideas of interest; (a) Foriegn military officers are seriously considering the consequences of the current US policy of pre-emptive strike and (b) America's military might is insufficient to achieve its stated goals. The latter point was made by way of highlighting American forces vulnerability to asymmetrical warfare.

One aspect of assymetical warfare was certainly demonstrated on 11 September 2001. A handful of terrorists conducted a very effective bombing raid on New York City, killing thousands. Nations, however, can also conduct asymmetrical warfare. The Center for Nonproliferation Studies reported on China's anti-sattelite weapons capability in this article: China's Space Capabilities and the Strategic Logic of Anti-Satellite Weapons

Thanks to Nova Spivack for blogging a pointer to the first story.

Current Kowari JARs ("version 1.2")

Andrae's company Netymon has kindly hosted an unofficial Kowari fork in lieu of a resolution with Northrop Grumman. Andrae has posted source and binary code for Kowari "version 1.2", which is what he is calling the natural completion of the release originally scheduled for January, 2006. Hopefully this will ease the pain of those waiting for an official release.

Netymon is also hosting source and binary for a version of Kowari with Andrae's latest iTQL extension.

Guidelines for RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability

The RDF/Topic Maps Task Force of the W3C's Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment (SWBPD) Working Group has a new draft of its document, Guidelines for RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability.

This document is not yet a public working draft, but it still has interesting things to say about the topic. Public comments are welcome to public-swbp-wg @ w3.org.

Defining N-ary Relations on the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment (SWBPD) Working Group has published Defining N-ary Relations on the Semantic Web as a Working Group Note.

In Semantic Web languages like RDF and OWL, a property links two individuals or an individual and a value. The Note presents patterns and considerations for representing relations between more than two individuals or values.

Thanks to the Ontology Engineering and Patterns Task Force for producing this Note.

Kowari's Legal Status

One positive outcome of Kowari's ownership and control scuffle has been the number of companies, some large, who have come out of the woodwork in support of the project. And they have lawyers.

The Kowari community has been assured that corporate lawyers, including some who were involved with the writing of the Mozilla Public License version 1.1, have reviewed the situation and that Kowari is safely and in perpetuity an Open Source project. That is, Northrop Grumman Corporation may not stop a fork of the code should that become necessary. That is reassuring news for the development team and should also help to reassure Kowari's user base.

Hopefully, Northrop will take steps shortly to make good on their promises of openness so that a fork can be avoided.

Although I am not under NDA with most of these companies, I will refrain from naming names except in one case. I was contacted (via a mutual colleague) by Eben Moglen, the patriarch if not the father of Open Source law, while in Australia a couple of weeks ago. His offer to help resolve the situation added substantial comfort. Although nobody wants a fight over Kowari's intellectual property rights, it is clear that the Open Source community is on firm legal ground.

The one murky issue is Kowari's trademark. Northrop owns it and the MPL v1.1 explicitly excludes trademarks from the license. Since Northrop has not, and most probably will not, license the use of the trademark to the Open Source community, one has to assume that we cannot use it. That means that we can build projects or products with Kowari, but we can't claim it in an advertising sense. The only references would be in required legal documentation and in the package names. That issue alone may force a fork to occur, since branding is important to Open Source developers too.

I should mention that I have still not had direct dealings with Kowari since resigning in January, although I hope that can change in the near future. If Northrop plays ball, so will I. If the project forks, I will follow the fork.

Experimenting with Advertising

I have, with some trepidation, turned on Google ads for this blog. Only public service ads are showing for the moment, until Google's lawyers review and approve my application.

Mostly, I am curious to explore the world of online advertising. I occasionally provide advice to a friend's Internet advertising company and need to have more personal experience with the space. Too, I am always surprised at how many people read my drivel, so perhaps the income will outweigh the disadvantages. If that does not turn out to be the case, I will turn it off.

Gee, HP Really Does Suck...

I stumbled on this little gem today while browsing software engineering faculty at the University of Maryland: HEY, HP, ARE YOU LISTENING????. It was written by Assoc. Prof. James Purtilo and mirrors my experiences nicely.

I've complained in the past about HP's software (see Why Does HP Software Suck? and Part 2).

Prof. Purtilo's staff page is also the home of this nifty tidbit:



"Somewhere, something went terribly wrong"? According to Jared Diamond, that something would be the migration of human food production to agriculture. Strangely, that correlates with this image :)

SPARQL Specifications are now W3C Candidate Recommendations

The W3C Advisory Committee has announced that the three SPARQL specifications are now W3C Candidate Recommendations. This is big news for the Semantic Web community. Congratulations to the DAWG!

The specifications are:

SPARQL Query Language for RDF
SPARQL Protocol for RDF
SPARQL Query Results XML Format

The State of Oz

I am in my third week visiting Brisbane, Australia. I have always loved living here and this trip has been no exception. We are in our old house, our tenants having vacated just before we arrived. There was a lot of work to be done on the place, mostly due to the climate. Overgrown gardens needed trimming, mold grows fast when plumbing leaks, termites in a section of a retaining wall (but not the house!). Nothing unexpected for Brisbane. All of it is now repaired, along with much new paint. The house is feeling like the top property it is again.

Food has become quite expensive here. We were shocked at the prices! A simple sandwich and coffee is well over the ten dollar mark. Lunch at the tourist restaurant on top of Mount Coot-Tha for the four of us neared A$60! Even groceries for the month have been exorbitant.

Paul tells me that it is no longer reasonable to expect to rent a house here for a price which would cover a mortgage payment. That agrees with our experience. The combination of food prices and rental prices points to a real problem with the economy here. The weather is still beautiful, though!

We have had a wonderful time bush walking Mount Coot-Tha, Mount Warning and South Stradbroke Island. The Eumundi Markets are as good as always. Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary and the Australia Zoo were big hits with the kids.

Brisbane remains a truly livable city, with its excellent bus service, walking trails and superb entertainment. It is a concern, though, that it may be becoming too expensive to live here.

Hello, Redland

After years of viewing RDF through the Kowari lens, I have finally moved on. I wrote my first Semantic Web application using Redland today.

Redland, by Dave Beckett, built and installed easily on my Mac Powerbook G4, but I had trouble getting the Java and Python language bindings to build. For the moment, I'm settling on the Perl and Ruby bindings, which is what I mostly use in any case.

The application, for those interested, was a small prototype showing how Semantic Web techniques could be used to foster requirements traceability in software engineering. I automatically generated software collaboration graphs from code, then laid documentation RDF alongside. I used a single SPARQL query to show when the requirements required re-validation. The idea could become an interesting Eclipse plug-in.

A Practitioner's View of Software Development

I've been asked to give a guest lecture tomorrow to the CSSE 3002 class (The Software Process) at the University of Queensland. The topic is "A practitioner's view of software development". Professor Dave Carrington wanted me to tell his software engineering students what they can expect in the real world and how to prepare for it.

The slides are available in PDF and PPT.

The End of an Age

Americans seem to treat our status as the world's most powerful country as given. Few recall that our ascendance to dominant superpower status occurred only after World War II. We squandered our good fortunes on a costly war in Vietnam, which resulted in President Nixon ceasing to back the US dollar with gold. That marked the first time in two millenia that the world did not have its most powerful currency backed by a scarce commodity. Instead, we moved it to being backed by simple goodwill.

Now, while our manufacturing has moved to China and the promised services boom has gone to India, we are squandering our remaining dollars on a costly war in Iraq. It should come as no surprise that the Euro countries now claim a larger economy and a more stable currency. Our days on top would seem to be numbered and we had better adjust our attitudes.

How long will it be before China catches up to the E.U. in total economic might? Less than a generation, that much is pretty certain. Then we will be at least number three.

Foriegn investments in US dollar bonds float our economy. They pay for our ballooning trade deficit and our overseas wars. What do you think will happen when those foriegn investors start to buy Euros instead? It is already starting to happen. We have less cash, less growth and less economic security than we think we have.

We used to claim the world's most populous city. New York is now number thirteen, behind Mumbai, Shaghai, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Moscow, Delhi, Karachi, Istanbul, Beijing, Mexico City, Jakarta and Tokyo. Don't know where all of those are? You'd better learn, and knowing at least one of their languages wouldn't hurt, either.

I don't know about you, but I am rearing my children to be prepared for a world that is not centered on America. Are you?

A Tale of Two American Ideas

A Tale of Two American Ideas


My country 'tis of thee
Sweet land of liberty (and big business)
Of thee I sing

This slight modification to the lyrics of America by Samuel F. Smith ruins the rhyme and the tune, but achieves greater accuracy. The United States has thrived on the confluence of the two grand ideas of capitalism and individual liberty throughout its history. We cannot accurately speak of one without acknowledging the impact of the other.

I like to anthropomorphize these ideas, as it aids the memory and fosters understanding. Please allow me to introduce to you two American heroes, Orville Redenbacher and Robert Heinlein.

Orville Redenbacher was famous for passing on his key to success in business, "Do one thing and do it better than anyone else." He set out to create the world's best popcorn by creating his own corn hybrid and ended up with the best selling popcorn brand in the U.S. Orville represents the power of focused greed, success by entrepreneurship and enterprising use of capitalist opportunities. Orville works the market.

Robert Heinlein was a disabled veteran of the U.S. Navy who became famous as a science fiction writer. He was a libertarian, a thoughtful man and one who believed in maximizing the growth of the individual. Heinlein is widely quoted on a range of topics, but the one I like to use to illustrate his core beliefs is this one:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

What a difference! Orville counseled specialization and Robert vehemently denigrated it. Could these two ever learn to live together?

They did, of course. Even in the days leading up to the American Revolution, it was easy to find both forces at work. Jefferson, student of the enlightenment, promoted the concept of individual liberty, including religious tolerance. Businessman Washington, it is rumored, promoted military resistance to Britain partly to avoid financial ruin. The British were blocking the Westward expansion upon which he bet heavily.

The interplay between commerce and philosophy built America and made it fundamentally different from our English-speaking friends. Without America's abundant natural resources and the mercantile mindset we borrowed from the Dutch at New York, the American economy would surely have failed to achieve world dominance. Our drive toward liberty also played a crucial role. England was determined to suppress troublesome American colonists by restricting economic growth, including Westward expansion. Canadians and Australians remained primary industry producers for the crown while America industrialized, a factor as important for their late arrival to economic success as their relative lack of resources.

Clearly, America the pastoralist could not have driven the railroad West to the Pacific Ocean. Orville's friends drove the railroad to the sea while Robert's sought to make a better life for their children and themselves. The West was settled because it was in the best interest of both Orville and Robert to go there. There was no stopping our heroes when their interests were aligned.

World War II provided America an opportunity to demonstrate the power of this alliance to the world. American industrial might out-produced all other players, while American servicemen fought totalitarianism on all fronts. Dictators were brought low and America became a global power in a few short years, all because Orville and Robert were fighting on the same team.

Most of American history may be seen as an interplay of these ideas. Which dominated? Which was suppressed? They have played off of one another, sometimes complimentary, sometimes in conflict. And that brings me to globalization.

Globalization makes Orville happy, nay, ecstatic. He can find cheaper labor to produce his products. Even factoring in additional transportation costs result in savings that he can apply directly to the bottom line. What does Robert get from globalization? As far as I can tell, globalization just makes Robert nervous.

The political storm recently unleashed by the intended purchase of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) by Dubai Ports World, a multinational corporation owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates, highlights the differences between Orville and Robert. Orville can't think of a reason to say "no". Robert can and the answer is "security".

In other words, Robert was happy to put up with globalization because he thought it didn't concern him. Now he is becoming aware that it does. National strategic interests, such as the manufacturing capability necessary to maintain the world's strongest military (once dictated by law to require U.S.-based sourcing) and the control of the country's borders, are now recognized to be in jeopardy. They have been for some time, of course. Robert just didn't notice until recently.

Orville can justify the operation of U.S. ports by foreign terminal operators because it is good business. It does not make for good security. As George Orwell pointed out so neatly in 1984, today's political ally often becomes tomorrow's enemy. Globalized business dependencies simply last longer than political alliances.

Robert has noticed the way in which we treat China as a trading partner instead of the largest single threat to U.S. interests worldwide. China's rising oil consumption and its territorial aspirations, coupled with our reliance on its manufacturing infrastructure may make bin Laden's Al Qaeda look like the mosquito it is. The Soviet Union, in contrast, was defeated by a policy of isolation, not an intimate tying of economies.

Perhaps Orville can justify our Chinese dependence by looking at the European model. After all, the first step toward the European Union was the European Coal and Steel Community, a way to grow the economies of post-War France and Germany without allowing either country to use their economic might to start another war. Surely, globalization will have a similar effect on U.S.-China relations? Sadly that is just not so.

European states have committed themselves to an "ever closer union", and have consistently, if slowly, given up sovereignty to do so. The U.S. and China rely on a laissez faire nearly-free market approach which does nothing to bind the warfighting abilities of the other. To think otherwise is naive in the extreme.

America's dependence on foreign oil is causing a similar split. Orville will adjust to market conditions. Robert feels exposed.

Robert's followers often come from the political right. And left. So do Orville's. The forces of capitalism and liberty cross party lines. They swing voters in the middle. When aligned, they can create the most powerful political, industrial and military juggernaut in the world. When they are opposed, they can rip our Congress and our foreign policy in two.

The solution to our current problem is simple. Let's get Orville and Robert on speaking terms. Fast. To do that, international business interests need to be tempered in the interests of national security and national security needs to be tempered in the interests of individual liberty.

An Opportunity for Mischief

Hmm. I spent a bit of time today attempting to find the URL for Dubai Ports World, the UAE government-owned company attempting to buy P&O. It was a bit hard to find because of all the news stories relating to it. In looking, I stumbled across the fact that dubaiportsworld.com is available.

Is anyone reading this with fewer scrupples than I? Perhaps a former employee of The Onion?

The real URL for Dubai Ports World is http://www.dpiterminals.com/.

Bernadette is Fine

Bernadette's nose (reported broken in an earlier post) is healing nicely following visits to an ENT and her chiropractor. Thanks to all who expressed condolences!

A Week with the Far Right

Last week was, umm, interesting. On the weekend, I went to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina to see a Marine friend who had just returned from a year in Iraq. Later in the week, I attended the monthly meeting of the Potomac Arms Collectors Association.

My friends are on both sides of the deep political divide that is early twenty-first century America. This particular week, I caught up with those on the far, far right. Christian, xenophobic, nationalist, steadfast, unwavering, gallant. Like us all, both good and bad, right and wrong.

Mark was my childhood friend. I have known him for (gasp!) 31 years. He joined the Marines when I joined the Navy and we even billeted together twice on the USS Blue Ridge during the formerly annual Team Spirit amphibious exercises off Korea. He stayed in Korea and works for the Army as a civil servant and serves in the Marine Reserves. I have taken my family to visit his in Korea and we get together whenever we can. He was called to active duty last year and went to Iraq as an advisor to an Iraqi battalion. Last weekend, he came back to the US to drop his combat gear before heading home to Seoul. I drove to Camp Lejeune to see him.

Mark had told me by email a week in advance that he thought he would arrive at Lejeune on a certain Friday at 3:30 PM. I know how the military works (slowly!), so I arrived in the area about 6:30 PM, checked into a hotel and waited. Mark called my cell phone at 1:30 AM, showed up by taxi at 2:00 AM and we talked for a couple of hours.

Mark was clearly processing a tremendous affront to his sensibilities. He shot no one and was not shot. Still, his vehicle (an aging Panhard armored car, not a HMMWV) was hit twice by improvised explosive devices and he spent some time sheltering from mortar fire. The thing that bothered him most, though, was the mortuary duty for his Marines and Iraqi colleagues.

He had to be on base and ready to go at 7, so we called it quits at 4 and I drive him back to his barracks. Camp Lejeune is big and I put 35 miles on my car getting there and back from a hotel that was only two miles outside the gate.

I slept in Sunday morning, knowing he would be working all day. Patience was the name of the game. There is no rushing a bureaucracy that size. I did some writing on a paper that day and just waited. He called at 4 PM to tell me he had a meeting at 5:00 and would call me when it was over. No problem. At 6:30 he knocked on the hotel room door. It was easier to get a cab than to wait in line for the only available pay phone.

That evening, we ate sushi ("bait" as Mark calls it) and then met some of his Marine buddies at SywanykS Scarlet and gold Traditions nightclub, owned by a retired Marine Sergeant Major with the unlikely name of Ihor Sywanyk. That place is both amazing and disgusting at the same time. SywanykS is a two-story bar with a dance floor, but every available piece of wall and ceiling is crammed with Marine (and some Navy) paraphernalia, including weaponry. Rifles, pistols, knives, uniforms, rank insignia, letters of historical significance, recruiting and movie posters and, naturally, flags. There were even crew-served weapons like a World War II 30-calibre machine gun and a couple of bazookas. Dates ranged from the earliest days of the Marines to the present, more than two centuries of military history. The disgusting part was the clientele. Not the Marines! The women.

There is a well understood corner of psychology which explains why wars and other lengthy military deployments foster infidelity. Most of the women in SywanykS were married (occasionally serially) to several Marines. The politically incorrect term has been, for millennia, "camp followers". I swear I recognized at least one from a bar in the Philippines twenty years ago. It certainly would not have been out of the question. In short, I had forgotten just how broken the marriage and social situation is in the service and the Marines of Camp Lejeune brought it home to me. I sat there and quietly drank my beer while Mark spoke with old friends, drank, danced a bit and generally reveled in being out of Iraq. He ate some meat which wasn't goat and basked in the normalcy of it all. We were, of course, up late.

Mark crashed in my hotel room, but was wide awake at 6 AM due to jet lag. He asked whether I wanted to get breakfast or sleep another 20 minutes :) I said I wanted to sleep, so he proceeded to talk to me until I hit the shower. I read some passages from Lawrence of Arabia's Seven Pillars of Wisdom about Iraq and the Arabs. He agreed with Lawrence's sentiments and mentioned that Seven Pillars was recommended reading for all Marine officers headed for Iraq. Unfortunately, he hadn't found the time to read it. He regrets it now. It really is a timeless appraisal of the Middle East, in spite of its colonial tone and rough descriptions of its inhabitants (such as calling the Syrians an "apelike people", although Mark and his Marines used harsher language than that).

Naturally, conversation at breakfast turned to U.S. foreign policy in the region. I was against the war and still am. I grow more convinced on a daily basis that the invasion and, indeed, the policy of proactive regime change is contrary to the United States' strategic interests. Mark, of course, staunchly defended our need to be there. As I presented him not with my arguments, but with Lawrence's, I saw an interesting reaction. He recognized the fundamental truth of the matter, that the culture of the region (the dominant memes, in the language of this blog) ensured that the only two things could happen; a strong leader would arise or the country would break up in sectarian violence. Jeffersonian democracy, with its reliance on an informed public and the rule of law, would not take root in a country ruled by tribal allegiances. And yet, he dared not admit to himself that his sacrifice and the more complete sacrifices of his colleagues were destined to be in vain. He recognized, but dare not admit, that the U.S. is likely to leave Iraq one day to its own devices without the hope of leaving a stable, democratic ally in its place.

"But", Mark said, "they really are bad guys and we are killing them."

"Of course they are.", I replied, "You are still cleaning up the mess left from the invasion. Saddam opened his prisons. Al Qaeda and others came in. And now we are making more of them every day, with the occupation, the publication of prison abuses, and the failure to do anything with the Guantanamo detainees. Do you think you can kill them all? Do you think you can stamp out an idea with force?".

"If you think violence never solves anything, ask the Carthaginians." Mark quoted Robert Heinlein.

Ah, but Alexander the Great showed us how to win an empire without genocide, didn't he? We do not have the guts or the reason, really, to just kill them all. Still, it was interesting to hear that the concept had indeed been discussed by Marine officers. That, to me, is an indication that our more soft strategy is not being as effective as they would like. It is also, academically, a nice illustration of meme iteration; some things go out of fashion, but the root ideas stay around.

Mark left breakfast troubled, which is why I did not discuss this state of affairs with him before his return. Combat requires focus, not armchair quarterbacking, no matter how accurate.

Mark is slowly making his way home to Korea, with planned stops in Ohio and Kansas City. God Speed, my friend. You are my brother in arms, my brother in blood and I am with you always. I thank you for your sacrifice and wish I could have been there with you to carry out our country's so very flawed policies. I raise a glass to you when I wish to raise a sword and shout, "Follow me!"

The contradiction is not lost on me. I disagree with the war, but want to go. It is my calling, my first and perhaps only true profession. As recently as nine months ago, the Chief Medical Officer at Fort Lee issued a letter saying that I was too broken to return to service. If he hadn't, or if I could have found a way to get a waiver, I would be there now. Do I miss the loneliness, the privations, the work. the uniform, the mission? No. I miss the brotherhood and feel that there is where I belong. I am damned to a hell of my own creation for failing to live up to requirements of health which keep me here, providing for my family, in the comfort of my own home, raising my children and living with my wonderful wife. There are times when I hate the comfort I have acquired and count myself less of a man for having achieved it.

I try to ignore these feelings. If we are to learn to live together in peace, to fix our planet's ecological and economic ills, we can no longer afford to listen to the stirrings of our animal emotions.

Back in the Great State of Northern Virginia, I received an invitation to attend a monthly meeting of the Potomac Arms Collectors Association, to be held at the headquarters of the National Rifle Association. My friend Chris proffered the invitation, a staunch Catholic, life member of the NRA, Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel and career civil servant at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. He was my roommate at the Virginia Military Institute. Chris collects and restores Springfield '03 rifles and is an avid shooter.

The gun club meeting was about as you'd expect. There was not a single member or guest who was anything other than a white male. Many routinely capped their sentences with an "Amen". About half were carrying a concealed, loaded pistol. The average age was old and the meeting paused several times for adjustments due to a member's lack of hearing, seeing or ability to hold water. That is not to say that there were no young members; in fact there were several. The young ones could shoot, but simply not yet afford the expensive toys.

The guest speaker was Martin K.A. Morgan, Director of Research for the New Orleans-based National D-Day Museum. He presented a fascinating (if esoteric) piece of research regarding the Medal of Honor winner Tony Stein. Stein's citation included the odd statement that he was, "armed with a personally improvised aircraft-type weapon". Morgan was intrigued and spent his time as a Hurricane Katrina evacuee in the National Archives attempting to discover what this weapon was. It turned out to be an ANM2 30-calibre machine gun, apparently "liberated" by the Marines from a downed Navy A-24 Dauntless aircraft. Stein's battalion had modified six of these things to provide extra firepower during the assault on Iwo Jima. Quite a story. The History Channel is apparently going to air his full story at the behest of Dr. Morgan sometime this year.

OK, so far, so good. Interesting research. A good story. Fat, old white men. Free food.

Then came show-n-tell ;)

Five tables had been arranged between speaker and audience. Upon them had been laid an assortment of weapons, mostly rifles, business end toward the speaker. Most dated from the World Wars and the fascination seemed to stem from their history. Weapons which had been used in combat, especially by themselves, their forebears or at least someone known to history were most highly prized.

There were Thompson machine guns, lots of Springfields and M1 Garands, variants from Russia, Finland, France, single-shot "get-a-guns" intended to be dropped to the French partisans, etc, etc, etc. Fifty people and more than that number of weapons.

Chris tells me that every collector was there for the feeling when they presented something which made another collector insanely jealous. I saw it happen once or twice. It wasn't pretty.

It really was like the show and tell session in an elementary school. These grown men would show off their wares. They would quote knowledge of a particular weapon's manufacturing, test and acceptance marks, serial numbers, known and suspected history. They would recount their efforts on e-bay to acquire missing parts. The one question which was always asked, sometimes in unbelieving tones, was "Have you shot it?"

The end of the meeting included a discussion of logistics for their upcoming gun show. There were tense questions regarding insurance and shocked expressions of pain when it became clear that not even dealers could carry concealed during the show. Ammunition could not be immediately accessible either, after a loaded .308 rifle was accidently discharged at a Fredericksburg gun show in January. Not unexpectedly, the opinion of the crowd was that the gun owner had been set up and falsely arrested.

Chris didn't want to go out to dinner or get a beer afterward. He needed his sleep. He was, after all, getting old.

Fighting Fate

In high school, I spent most of my time and energy on literature, history and comparative religion. I then studied engineering in college primarily to be forced to learn more math. Funny how people work, isn't it?

So, it was no surprise to be told that my personality suggests a different graduate degree. My friend Weeble discovered the same thing. It was probably that question about always arguing with the prof...

You Should Get a PhD in Liberal Arts (like political science, literature, or philosophy)

You're a great thinker and a true philosopher. You'd make a talented professor or writer.

What Advanced Degree Should You Get?

Lost Opportunity in the Philippines

Twenty years ago this week, I was a young naval officer visiting the Philippine capital city of Manila. I walked into a basket shop about ten miles from the port (and my ship), only to be chased out by a large street mob. The coup against dictator Ferdinand Marcos had begun.

Although Marcos was a key US ally, he was also a corrupt dictator. We did a lot of that in those days, and unfortunately still do when we find it convenient. I couldn't help but feel that his overthrow would usher in a more representative government for the Filipino people. Cory Aquino's People Power revolution unseated Marcos, but sadly, could not repair the nepotism and financial corruption embedded in Filipino culture.

This week, the Philippine government celebrated the twenty-year anniversary of the People Power revolution by stopping another coup.

I'm pretty sure the lesson is that it is easier to destroy than create (or to fix). History is clear that revolutions tend to be highjacked by alternate political interests as soon as they occur (e.g. the Russian Revolution of 1917). Even strong outside powers have failed to figure out the fine art of nation building. William Shawcross' book Deliver Us From Evil, which documents UN attempts to fix failed states, is excellent reading for anyone convinced otherwise. Too bad George Bush and Condy Rice didn't read it before destroying the governmental infrastructure of Iraq.

Broken Nose and Bruised Ego

It was the strangest morning. We normally spend an hour doing Tae Kwon Do each Saturday morning and today was no exception. I didn't particularly want to go and neither did my eight-year-old son Aidan. Bernadette did and we went anyway. As is normal for a Saturday, we warmed up playing games during the family class, such as dodge ball. It makes a nice change from stretching, running and calisthenics.

About ten minutes into the games, Bernadette held Aidan in front of her to avoid getting hit. She was, of course, just playing. Aidan over-reacted and head-butted her. Hard. He did, in fact, break her nose. She heard it crack and bled nicely all over the mat.

Two hours in the Loudoun County Hospital were sufficient to determine that the break was present, minor and no significant deviation of the bone occurred. Unbelievably, he hit her far enough up on the bone that the septum does not appear to have deviated either. That means she is likely to recover without surgery. Whew!

Aidan feels horrible and Bernadette is doped up on Tylenol with Codine. *Sigh*. The family that plays together...

The Principle of Least Power

The Principle of Least Power in relation to computer languges suggests that one should use the least powerful language capable of performing a given task. Advantages of doing this include higher liklihoods of data reusability and security. In short, you limit your exposure to the Law of Unknown Consequences, which states that any action causes consequences and some of those consequences cannot be predicted.

The W3C's Technical Architecture Group (TAG) has recently decided to make The Principle of Least Power a "Draft TAG Finding", further embedding this idea into Web architecture.

Can Corporations Stop Doing Evil?

My family recently acquired a Tivo digital video recorder. Once we started time shifting, I naturally started to think about the impact on the business models of the broadcasters and advertisers. I realized that advertisers could adjust to the millions of time-shifters by using reasonably static images on a portion of their screen real estate. One could still be brand-imprinted, even while fast forwarding.

That isn't what they did.

It didn't take me long to realize that advertisers, almost certainly with assistance from broadcasters, now randomly interleave frames from a show into a the commercial video stream. This results in a user slowing to normal speed playback, thinking the show is back on. They end up watching a commercial. In other words, advertisers had a opportunity to adjust to a new technological environment simply and effectively, but choose an aggressive (and antagonistic) approach instead. It is no wonder we hear talk of certain corporations "hating their customers".

This is the month that Google decided to facilitate censorship in China. Google's corporate philosophy is still on the Web, and number 6, "You can make money without doing evil", is still there, too. Although much has been made of this by others, it is my opinion that Google executives came across a difficult problem: Make less money by appealing to philosophy or more money by appeasing China. More money won. Everything else is justification.

This is also the month that Northrop Grumman decided to seize control of the Open Source Kowari project, a move which will probably result in the project's death over time. Although this action was not in the league of Enron's massive malfeasance or the lack of acceptable governance which lead to the Exxon Valdez disaster, it came from the same root cause: Corporations, via their most effective employees, choose short-term profits over long-term concerns. That goes for the protection of their customer base, the environment, and even executive jail time.

Is it possible for a modern corporation to compete and still act ethically? In spite of all evidence to the contrary, I believe there is hope. What we need is a meme iteration.

Twentieth Century Europe has managed just such a meme iteration. T. R. Reid's excellent book The United States Of Europe documents the rise of the European Union from the ashes of the First and Second World Wars. Europeans, it seems, finally got so fed up with killing each other that they formed an intertwining economy so that the individual nations simply couldn't gear up for war. In other words, the very idea of continuing the millennia-old practice of warfare became untenable and had to be replaced.

Will the EU succeed? Or will history judge it to be a flash in the pan, a minor interruption in the violence? Perhaps it will end up in a non-creative stasis like Renaissance Switzerland:

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."
-- Orson Wells: The Third Man

Japan's attempt to form a more perfect society during the Tokugawa era ended in just such a stasis, albeit an extremely refined one. The thing I find most fascinating about this period in history is that the Tokugawa shoguns did not attempt to eliminate aggressive tendencies in their society, but to channel them.

In which ways do we in the United States of America attempt to deal with the reality of human (especially male) aggression? Spectator sports? An over-active military? More people in prison than any other industrialized country?

I am no stranger to male aggression, but I do not choose to ignore it or pretend that it does not exist. I am a graduate of two military colleges, a certified U.S. Navy "warfare specialist" and a martial artist. I believe that I know something of mankind's inherent aggressive tendencies. My wife and I chose to enroll our son in martial arts at a young age specifically to channel those energies positively.

Aggressive and competitive tendencies assisted our ancestors to survive. That's why they are there. Effective channeling, not avoidance, seems necessary. We can do that with diversion ("Yay! The Steelers won! Woo hoo!") or direction (such as the very existence of the Special Forces and the CIA), but we had better not ignore it.

The same is true of corporate governance. Executives who want to play the game need to be provided diversion or direction to stop them from hurting innocents. There must also be limitations. That is why we have Open Source licenses and environmental regulations. Too bad legislation lags corporate actions so badly.

Can we find memes that enhance our ability to feed the planet, save other species, encourage happy, healthy people and get on with life without corporate evil? I hope so. We'll keep looking. Perhaps that is what Thomas Jefferson meant when he wrote of the "pursuit of happiness" being an "inalienable right".

Diving into Ruby

Brian introduced me to Ruby fully a year ago, but I only started to code something in it last month. My initial reaction has been very, very positive. The only problem I have had with anything in the Ruby or Rails environments related to the known-broken SaltedHashLoginGenerator, which I eventually decided to avoid for now.

Tonight I attended the first (some say second) meeting of NovaRUG. I was hesitate about attending another users group, especially after Bernadette noted that it was "so ninties" to do so. However, I was not at all hesitate about hearing what Rich Kilmer was up to. Brian calls him the more productive person he knows, and with good reason. Rich is the genius behind Ruby Gems and kindly hosts RubyForge.

Rich presented two Ruby applications. The first was a prototype mid-air refueling simulation for the U.S. Air Force via BBN. He (amazingly( pulled it off in 200 hours of coding, complete with a multi-layer Mercador-projection map by making use of his ActiveStep GUI API for Macromedia Flash. It was a stunning peice of discliplined, logical thought. The second app was the upcoming product from his company InfoEther, called Indi. Indi is a portable, PDA-like environment on a USB drive. It includes two executables, one each for Windows and Mac OS X. Running either will bootstrap a browser/Flash environment to run the Ruby application. Very cool. A Linux version will come out as soon as Macromedia allows Linux to support Flash 8 format.

I'm not going to announce my own Ruby app yet, just in case my impending move to Fredericksburg and trip to Australia get in the way of completion. However, rest assured that I will blog it, release it under an Open Source license and throw up a service to allow free use as soon as I have it in a pretty state.

Policy Aware Web Meeting, Day 2

Day two of the Policy Aware Web face-to-face meeting ended up about as I expected. Over the last year, we have been able to show that policies and logical proofs can effectively be used to control access to Web resources between two parties. This year, we are moving on to the more interesting three- and four-party scenarios.

In short, we want to allow a policy to allow very non-technical Web users to be given access where their relationship to the content is proven by a logical proof constructed of elements from other, more technical, sites. We have to allow everyone's grandmother to play.

I'll have the new use case up shortly, but for now it is given in the meeting notes.

Tim Berners-Lee showed off his Tabulator at the PAW meeting, proving once again that he is not only smarter than the rest of us, he is also more productive. The Tabulator is very, very cool. It is a 100% javascript application to navigate and display Web-based RDF content to the point where it grounds in the traditional Web. It also allows searches within multiple identified RDF sources. Tim's vision of the Semantic Web is simply more clear than mine and it continues to impress me.

Policy Aware Web Face-to-Face Meeting

Today was the first day of the semi-annual Policy Aware Web project face-to-face meeting.

Open ID still likely to be used for the demo code, although discussion continues. FOAF secrets are also still a candidate. It is a primary goal to ensure the final architecture, which is not yet complete, be agnostic to authentication mechanisms.

We are playing with a new use case, to extend the ones already listed on the PAW use cases page. The new use case is an extension of the photo sharing idea, where a family member of a conference attendee wishes to see a photo and the policy allows it. That will be fun to implement and will be the first time we are trying a use case with four actors.

For the first time, we used SubEthaEdit to take minutes instead of #PAW on IRC. This was because only one person showed up with a PC; everyone else had a Mac Powerbook. SubEthaEdit allowed seven or eight of us to edit the same document to create meeting minutes that we all agreed to.

Firefox's Ping Considered Harmful

The Firefox browser has implemented a ping attribute on HTML anchors and areas. The idea is to notify a different URL when the link is clicked and is meant for Web usage tracking. The justification is that since link trackers are doing this anyway with Javascript hacks, why not make it cleaner?

I am surprised that the Mozilla team would encode this in an HTML change. I thought they would prefer to fight this sort of privacy invasion instead of encoding it in an Open Source project. So much for Open Source being equivalent to Open Society.

Fixing Agriculture

Jared Diamond has called the invention of agriculture, "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race". His point is that is was bad for the nutrition of individuals, lead to cities and therefore large-scale conflict and is unquestionably bad for the planet.

There may be a solution. Enter Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute.

Jackson has famously said, "If we don’t get sustainability in agriculture first, sustainability will not happen." And he is doing something about it. His big idea is remarkably simple: Bio-engineer crops which are perennial underground, but act like harvestable, annuals above ground. We would get food without a continual depletion of soil nutrients. Cool!

The Green Flash is Real and I've Seen It

A common topic of discussion among blue-water sailors is whether one has seen the illusive "green flash". Invariably, most don't believe it happens, some believe and maybe one in a couple hundred have actually seen it. I fall into the last category. I have been fortunate enough to see it three times, twice in the Western Pacific and once about 200 nautical miles North of Hawai'i.

When the sun is just below the horizon, some rays are refracted by the atmosphere and are thus visible. That causes twilight. If the conditions are just right, the atmosphere may act as a prism and split the light into its component wavelengths as it passes your position. Just for a fraction of a second, one may see the flash of green (or even violet or blue, which makes sense theoretically, although the green is easiest to see).

The phenonenon is rare because the atmosphere is rarely clear enough, and people rarely observe the sun at just the right time. I know navigators who have observed sunsets hundreds of days at sea and missed it every time.

The beautiful image below was captured by a Finish photographer in 1992. I found it via Google, posted as a Goddard Spaceflight Center Astronomy Image of the Day.

Northrop Grumman's Position on Kowari

After some consideration, I have decided to publish the letter from Northrop Grumman senior counsel Michael Wallach. I interpreted that letter as threatening, in spite of its polite tone. It was clear upon a careful reading that Northrop Grumman did not intend to comply with the terms of the MPL.

My response to Mr. Wallach attempted to address the factual errors made in his letter, especially as related to Northrop's directions to me as a consultant and their misapplication of the MPL.

Hopefully, this will help answer some of the questions about Northrop Grumman's intentions toward Kowari.

I separately wrote a response to Brian Ippolito, Northrop Grumman's director of the Tucana project. In that letter, I expressed my concerns about their gratuitous use of lawyers and announced my resignation from the Kowari project.

It is my opinion that Northrop Grumman does understand the MPL as it relates to Kowari, they simply don't like it. I personally briefed Mr. Ippolito on the MPL in November 2005 and he asked detailed questions.

Open Source Advocates Support Kowari

I have been pleased to see the blogosphere discussing Northrop Grumman's decision to stop the Kowari version 1.1 release. Some entries from good people in the know:

Kowari contributors:

Andrae

Paul

Andrew

Third parties:

Alex from SOFA, who also sent this email threatening SOFA interoperability

Kendall from UMD

Danny Ayers

Henry from Sun

Erik Hatcher of Lucene fame expressed regrets to me by email.

Aerospace-Defense News picked up the story from Andrew's MoreNews.

Resignation from Kowari due to Northrop Grumman Letter

It is with sincere regret that I resigned as an administrator and developer of the Kowari Metastore.

This action follows receipt of a letter from Northrop Grumman advising me that any attempt to release Kowari version 1.1 could cause "irreparable harm" to their company. I received the letter on Friday, 6 January 2006 and took no action on the project after that time.

Northrop Grumman's position seems to be that they "purchased all rights associated with the Kowari software", a position not reconcilable with their continued release of the software under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1.

I was not able to fulfill my responsibilities as a Kowari administrator following receipt of the letter, and so I resigned. I was concerned that I would be in the middle if I retained admin privileges and another admin either (a) executed the release, (b) took administrative action Northrop didn't like or (c) inserted code that Northrop was unhappy with. In the end, it was (b) that happened and I was glad this morning not to be in the middle.

I plan to continue my contributions to the Semantic Web and Open Source communities. More news shortly.

Bijan Parsia (Whoops! That should have been Kendall Clark - ed.) had an interesting post entitled Is Northrup Grumman Smushing Kowari?. He has is pretty close to right, especially his final comments: "Relying on Kowari is now not prudent, given our obligation to do our best for our clients; but it’s also bad for Semantic Web uptake in the US federal government, and that’s something Northrup Grumman should think very carefully about." What a shame.

Still, it ain't over 'till its over and it's never over. There are still ways to move forward with Kowari or other SemWeb stores and I intend to explore those options.

Taking a Stand on Banned Books, Part 5

In a continuation of my attempts to determine whether the FBI is monitoring the inter-library loan system, I ordered Sayed Qutb's Milestones and the US Army's Improvised Munitions Handbook today from my local library. They had neither, and so an inter-library loan request was generated. If anyone is watching, that will have to match some keywords. Qutb is a radical Islamic knucklehead.

The reference librarian told me that inter-library loan requests go to the OCLC for processing. She was curious, too, whether the OCLC had been, as she put it, "compromised". I certainly hope that the answer is "no".

Either we live in a free country or we don't. If we don't, I expect a visit from the powers that be. If we do, then I expect to borrow some books I don't plan to read (although I'll probably glance through them).

See also Part 4.

Causing Creativity

Is is possible to take actions which make you more creative? I think so, and I am not alone.

I started my professional career in a process-oriented job. I drove ships for the Navy. It took me about two years to qualify to do that, after my initial training schools. Although there was a lot to learn, it was not a creative role. Judgement was considered key, not creativity. I became good at absorbing information, synthesizing it and judging effects. I certainly did not think of myself as creative. I did not create professionally or as a hobby during those years.

However, graduate school in engineering often did require creativity. Theses, design contests, even class projects occasionally required invention. I found it hard, very hard, to return to a process-oriented job after that experience. When I left the Navy, I suddenly had to be creative again. I needed to find work, create a new career for myself. Eventually, I co-founded a series of companies, wrote patents, invented new technologies. In short, the act of changing environments lead me to become creative in a way I didn't anticipate.

There is some reason to think that one's activities can influence behavior, including creativity. The Smithsonian has a nice site on this very topic. They note the similarities between creative action in adults and play in children.

Child development experts generally recognize four types of play: (a) exploration/tinkering, (b) make believe/visual thinking, (c) social play/collaboration and (d) puzzle play/problem solving. Perhaps one needs to explore all four types in order to foster creativity.

Happy New Year

Happy new year to all. My plans this year include continuing to spend significant time with my family, moving house to Fredericksburg, Virginia, authoring or co-authoring at least three technical books, building Kowari and finishing my Ph.D. If that doesn't keep me busy enough, I'll probably continue to consult to small companies and those involved in the Semantic Web.

Taking a Stand on Banned Books, Part 4

My local library called today to tell me that my inter-library loan request for "The Little Red Book" was in. I picked it up and reviewed it briefly. Mao was certainly a nutter. He thought that Marx's ideas on a natural progression toward communism should be rushed and that force was the way to do it. I wonder whether he actually believed in Marx or whether it was all political expedience. I suppose we'll never know for certain. We do know that Marx was wrong - he underestimated the power of greed.

Any student of Communist China should certainly read about Mao's yes-men and their hiding of the truth from Mao during the great famine after Mao initiated the Great Leap Forward. I recommend Hungry Ghosts for those interested.

I plan to further my quest to determine whether the inter-library loan system is monitored by the FBI. I've decided to request Hitler's Mein Kampf, Sayyid Qutb's Milestones and the US Army's Improvised Munitions Handbook. If they are watching, that will have to get their attention. Those requests will have to wait until after a quick holiday visit to my parents, though. I couldn't do it today because I left my list at home and couldn't recall how to spell "Qutb" :)

In other news, Slashdot rejected my Ask Slashdot submission asking which books might be on an FBI watch list. No surprise there. I'm probably starting to sound like a nutter myself unless it turns out that they are watching.

See also: Story About "Little Red Book" was a Hoax, Part 3

Most scientists are bottle washers and button sorters.

So said the ever-quotable Robert Heinlein's character Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love. I recalled it while spending most of today tediously creating graphics for an upcoming paper entitled "Evolution of Software Collaboration Graphs and their Properties". Sigh.

Why Does H-P Software Suck? Part 2

I wasted about five hours yesterday trying to install a new HP Officejet 7310xi printer/fax/scanner. Our old one gave up the ghost for no reason I can determine other than planned obsolescence. The 'xi' designation seems to denote that it was sold through Costco.

The hardware seems to be pretty good. Two-page printing works, the color is great, the ink jet cartridges have improved. The software sucks. Really.

The first problem I noticed was that the desktop software (drivers, UI and various third-party bundles) simply wouldn't install on Mac OS X (10.4.3). This is almost not surprising, given the huge amount of software that HP insists on installing (thousands of files supporting many applications not needed to print, fax and scan). After trying everything I could think of, I downloaded a different version of the installer from HP's support Web site. That worked, and reduced the total installable files for a minimal installation from 6,530 to 488 due to the removal of the third-party bundles. I continued to notice poor quality control, such as GUI buttons which didn't always paint, memory corruption and evidence of ten-year-old Mac Classic code.

I wondered what some of the third-party code did, so I clicked the information button for 'readiris' during the installation. The help kindly informed me that 'This installs the readiris package'. Help for all other options were similarly undescriptive. You can just picture the programmer shoving that into a string in order to move on to more important work. Due to a lack of testing and project management, it never became anyone else's problem and was shipped.

The final straw was the fax setup. The fax does not release the phone line after a successful transfer. It doesn't mater whether the printer has an extension handset plugged in or whether it is sharing a POTS line via a splitter. After faxing, the only way to recover the phone line is to unplug it and then plug it back in.

There is also evidence that the firmware hasn't been significantly updated for this model. The 7300 series has an LCD screen, which shows pretty but generally gratuitous graphics. An error on the fax, however, will still result in a paper error page being printed, as in previous versions.

In all, it is clear that HP has followed their US brethern in outsourcing their software to overseas teams who do not coordinate with each other. There was no evidence of significant integration testing. There was plenty of evidence of junior engineers making a series of minor changes without understanding the system-wide ramifications. They have clearly not invested in creating new software or even in hardening what they have. My wife, a former HP software engineer, notes that all the good managers left before or during the last mergers. It shows.

See also: Part 1

Story About "Little Red Book" was a Hoax

Bruce Schneier announced that the story about Mao's "Little Red Book" and FBI agents was a hoax. SouthCoastToday, the original publisher, published the correction. Thanks to Andrew for the link.

I, and apparently a number of librarians out there, are still quite curious whether the inter-library loan system is being monitored. I intend to push the limits by ordering every book I can find on the suspected watch list to see what happens.

Taking a Stand on Banned Books, Part 3

Why is it that requesting (not even reading) a book on the watch list will get you a visit from the FBI, but the Improvised Munitions Handbook (US Army Training Manual 31-210) is widely available for download? You can get a nicely printed copy of it from the same people that print it for the Pentagon for US$12.

Does anyone else find this a bit surreal?

NB: Story About "Little Red Book" was a Hoax.

See also: Part 2.

Victory in Pennsylvania over "Intelligent Design"

A U.S. district judge ruled today that a Pennsylvania school system cannot teach "Intelligent Design" in a biology class, calling it a violation of the Constitutional separation of church and state.

Although I try to be tolerant of other people's ideas, I am particularly pleased that this watered-down religious dogma is not going to be taught as science, at least there and at least for now. I have previously posted on a refutation of "irreducible complexity", a foundation of the "Intelligent Design" argument.

Thanks to Brian for pointing me to Garry Trudeau's take on the decision.

Taking a Stand on Banned Books, Part 2

I've ordered the full copy of Mao's "The Little Red Book" from the inter-library loan system. I have also posted an Ask Slashdot question on which other books might be on the watch list. Hopefully, the Slashdot editors will approve it.

I've decided to request as many books on the watch list as I can find.

See also: Part 1, Part 3.

Taking a Stand on Banned Books, Part 1

A friend pointed me to a The Standard-Times report today about a student at U.Mass Dartmouth who requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's "The Little Red Book" for a research paper. The student was visited by agents of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and never got access to the book. (NB: Story About "Little Red Book" was a Hoax)

The shocking thing about this is not that the Patriot Act is being abused. We all knew that would happen. The shocking thing is that the student wishes to remain nameless because he "fears repercussions", according to the report. Similarly, the student's professor is considering canceling plans for a class on terrorism because "because it might put his students at risk".

Should we stand idly by while strong-arm tactics are applied to our civil liberties, or should we defend our right to read the dangerous, inciteful, often mistaken but certainly educational books of our enemies? Sun Tsu and Clauswitz agreed on the first principle of war, "know your enemy". Sun Tzu, for example, said "The more you read and learn, the less your adversary will know." How can we know them if we can't read what they have written?

Commenting on the possible relationship between "The Little Red Book" and the War on Terror is nearly beneath me. Why is this book on a watch list at all? Under which general principles is this book a danger to our society? Its contents are even well known and widely quoted.

I have decided to take a stand. Immediately after this posting, I am headed to my local library (conveniently located in Ashburn, VA, close to the Washington, DC headquarters of the FBI) to request a copy of "The Little Red Book". I will be careful to request the version directly translated from the Chinese via inter-library loan and published in Beijing. Naturally, I will post the results here.

See also Part 2.

Thomas Jefferson and Tokugawa Ieyasu

Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of the United States and the author of the Declaration of Independence from Britain, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate which ruled Japan from 1603-1868, were very different people. Jefferson espoused Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty and Tokugawa was a ruthless military dictator. Their works set their respective countries on very different paths that would last centuries. Yet surprisingly, the personal codes for living used by the two men were remarkably similar.

Jefferson's Ten Rules are available from Monticello or, for a more academic link, see Cornell University Library.

Tokugawa's Creed is here in Japanese, but the creed itself is translated into English.

True to Jefferson's protestant Christian cultural package, most of his rules are negative directions, whereas Tokugawa's Asian philosophies come out in his positive directions for the "proper" way of living.

Both men went to great lengths to calm their minds to avoid acting from anger. Jefferson: "Take things always by the smooth handle.", "When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, count a hundred." Tokugawa: "Patience is the foundation of security and long life; consider anger as an enemy."

Both recognized what is today sometimes called " material trap", although I suspect Jefferson came to it pretty late in life. Jefferson: "Never spend money before you have earned it.", "Never buy what you don't want because it is cheap.", "We seldom repent of having eaten too little." Tokugawa: "If you regard discomfort as a normal condition, you are not likely to be troubled by want.", "The insufficient is better than the superfluous." (which is more literally translated as, "Realize your limitations. It is the biggest dew drop that first falls from the leaf.")

Both preferred to be their own men. Jefferson: "Never trouble another for what you can do yourself." Tokugawa: "Blame yourself, do not blame others."

Neither believed their own press and fought against the temptation to do so. Jefferson: "Pride costs more than hunger, thirst and cold." Tokugawa: "When ambition rises in your mind, consider the days of your adversity." Note that Tokugawa was held as a captive for much of his childhood and here he councils patience, as he does elsewhere.

Naturally, there are some differences. Jefferson's "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today." seems to conflict with Tokugawa's "Man's life is like making a long journey with a heavy burden. One must not hurry." Still, I suspect that those rules refer to different concepts. I doubt Tokugawa was lazy, he just knew how and when to wait. Jefferson may have had a similar concept in mind when he penned "How much pain the evils cost us that never happened.", his consideration that one should avoid excessive worry.

There does not seem to be a direct comparison to Jefferson's "Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly." Tokugawa may have recognized the fact, but probably didn't think it important given his austere manner of daily living.

One has no way of knowing Jefferson's feelings regarding Tokugawa's "He who only knows victory and does not know defeat will fare badly.", but, given Jefferson's support of the American Revolution, he was clearly willing to put his privileged position at risk.

In all, I find the number of similarities to greatly outweigh the differences. That these two men should share so much in common makes me re-evaluate the boundary between Adolph Bastian's "elementary ideas", which we all share, and "folk ideas" (culture).

Memes and Simple Survival

I recently ran across Stanford's provacative John McCarthy and his ideas on Ideology and Sustainability. I really must remember to introduce him to evolutionary meme theories and see what happens.