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.

A Simple and Effective Wiki in Ruby

I was looking for a simple but effective wiki to run on Mac OS X for my home network. After a bit of looking, I found SOKS. It was trivial to set up and use.

SOKS is written in Ruby and released under an Open Source license.

To install SOKS, one simply grab it via gems, the ruby package manager, run the setup script and start using it:


$ sudo gem install Soks
$ /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/Soks-1.0.3/bin/soks-create-wiki.rb


The soks-create-wiki.rb script will ask you where you want to install the wiki itself. Anywhere will do. The directory you use will be referred to as '...' for the rest of this post.

Use a Web browser to go to http://localhost:8000, which shows you instructions for use and customization. At a minimum, you will want to modify the stylesheet located at .../attachment/stylesheet.css (since the default reds are ugly) and .../attachment/logo.jpg (the site logo). To name the wiki and expose it via a public URL, you will need to modify a couple of lines at the top of .../start.rb, but this is well documented.

I only had one problem with the setup: Some (not all) of the URLs in the sidebar continued to point to localhost, even after I changed the system base URL to a proper machine name. The solution was to edit the sidebar to remove just one of the links and then again to put it back in. Whatever cache was stale happily updated.

Mac OS X uses launchd to launch applications on boot and when directed by the launchctl command line utility. To get the wiki launching automatically, I created a file called /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/soks.plist with the following content:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Disabled</key>
<false/>
<key>Label</key>
<string>soks</string>
<key>OnDemand</key>
<false/>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/local/bin/ruby</string>
<string>/Users/dwood/Documents/soks-wiki/start.rb</string>
</array>
<key>ServiceIPC</key>
<false/>
</dict>
</plist>


Once that file is in place, the wiki may be started:


$ sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/soks.plist
$ sudo launchctl start soks


I used the Mac's Network System Preferences to open port 8000 in the firewall so other machines on my network could access the service.

NB: Unfortunately, I wouldn't use SOKS on a public machine yet. Ruby 1.8.3 seems to have a broken YAML which prohibits SOKS from running and Ruby 1.8.2 (which I'm using) has a known security flaw. I'm sure the Ruby guys will square that away shortly.

Bernadette and I are using SOKS to work collaboratively on a new book. More details on that coming shortly.

Terry Pratchett on Venture Capital

I just finished Terry Pratchett's Going Postal (hey, it is the holidays!). It is another in the incredibly punny, and subtley in-your-face Discworld series. In it is this beautiful passage on venture capital, as spoken by Ankh-Morpork's despot Lord Vetinari (page 74 of the American paperback):

"Let us consider a situation in which some keen and highly inventive men devise a remarkable system of communication", he said. "What they have is a kind of passionate ingenuity, in large amounts. What they don't have is money. They are not used to money. So they meet some... people, who introduce them to other people, friendly people, who for, oh, a forty-percent stake in the enterprise give them the much-needed cash and, very important, much fatherly advice and an introduction to a really good firm of accountants. And so they proceed, and soon money is coming in and money is going out, but somehow, they learn, they're not quite as financially stable as they think, and really do need more money. Well, this is all fine, because it's clear to all that the basic enterprise is goinig to be a money tree one day, and does it matter if they sign over another fifteen percent? It's just money. It's not important in the way that shutter mechanisms are, is it? And then they find out that yes, it is. It is everything. Suddenly, the world's turned upside down, suddenly those nice people aren't so friendly anymore, suddenly it turns out that those bits of paper they signed in a hurry - were advised to sign by people who smiled all the time - mean that they don't actually own anything at all, not patents, not property, nothing. Not even the contents of their own heads, indeed. Even any ideas they have now don't belong to them, apparently. And somehow they're still in trouble about money. Well, some run and some hide and some try to fight, which is foolish in the extreme, because it turns out that everything is legal, it really is. Some accept low-level jobs in the enterprise, because one has to live and in any case the enterprise evens owns their dreams at night. And yet actual illegality, it would appear, has not taken place. Business is business."

The passage is quoted under the right granted by HarperCollins Publishers for brief quotations in reviews. Italics in the original.

Highly recommended! Buy a copy today.

Great Mexican Restaurant in Herndon, VA

If you ever want to find a superb Mexican restaurant (and who doesn't?) and are near Herndon, Virginia, check out Teocalli Tamale at 336 Elden St, Herndon, VA, 20170, +1 703 904 9336. They are fantastic!

Mike, the owner, started Teocali Tamale in Colorado and brought the slow-roasted tradition to Virginia. The restaurant itself is a small hole-in-the-wall in a strip mall, but classic Blues play inside and the food is just wonderful. Give 'em a try! I plan to hold all my lunch meetings there for the forseeable future.

Explaining the Debate on Iraq

The debate on the war in Iraq is simple to explain. Why do our professional warriors insist that the war can be won? Because it is their job to believe they can win. They want to win. They demand to win. They would insist on victory even if (especially if) they were fighting an unbeatable enemy on the streets of Washington, D.C. Any war strategy based on asking the military whether they think they can win is doomed to failure.

That is yet another reason why an enlightened country should actively avoid war, and yet fight any it is forced into to the death. Unfortunately, we were not forced into this war; we sought it and are now paying the price, much as we paid the price for the ridiculously aggressive Spanish-American War or the ill-conceived Vietnam War.

How many times must we be told that causing and then fighting a serious insurgency is a bad idea? History tells us that, as do the current insurgencies around the world. Not one of them is being truly won. At best, they fall into an uncomfortable pseudo peace, for a while.

Better to lead in a way that others will follow, as Congressman Ron Paul said in 2002 - and complained that he was being attacked as a terrorist sympathizer for following the foreign policy ideals of America's founding fathers. We lead the world when we are better than our enemies, not when we engage in torture, plant propaganda in the foreign press and otherwise act as ignorant and ill-behaved as they are.

To make matters right, we must lead morally. Only then will the world follow.

I believe that America is acting in inappropriate ways for the simple reason that we all want to, sometimes. It is a normal emotional response in our leaders to lash out at what we do not understand and to do so with force. The only thing that prevents that overreaction is the calming action of the balance of governmental powers. The only way to save America from itself is to restore the limitations once imposed on the executive branch by policy. A new check on the Administration's ability to wield military power, unreliant on policy, is needed.

XTech 2006 Call for Participation

The Call for Participation for XTech 2006 (formerly XML Europe) is now available. The conference will be 16-19 May 2006 in Amsterdam (note that WWW 2006 is 23-26 May in Scotland). The track that includes SemWeb, tagging, microformats is entitled "Open Data".

Papers at this conference are selected by peer review of *abstracts*.

The important dates are:
9 January / Presentation and Tutorial Proposals Due
10 February / Accepted Speakers Notified
17 March / Late Breaking News & Product Proposals Due

I presented the Kowari overview paper at XTech 2005, which was also in Amsterdam. It was a lot like WWW, only less so. A number of the speakers overlapped, as did the content and focus. If you can't get to WWW, XTech is a reasonable choice.

Trip Report from WISE 2005's International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS 2005)

On Sunday, 20 November 2005, I attended the International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS 2005), held as part of The 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE 2005) in New York City. Whew! That is a rather fancy way of saying that I spent a weekend day working in a small conference room with twenty SemWeb geeks, about half of whom I already knew.

Semantic Web repositories were well represented: Dave Beckett, creator of Redland, Steve Harris of 3Store and Alex Hall and myself from Kowari.

I was on the program committee for the workshop and presented a short paper entitled "Scaling the Kowari Metastore" [1]. That paper surveyed the options to keep Kowari as the most scalable SemWeb database. I hope we will get the chance to implement some of them in 2006 so we can keep ahead of the game.

Dave Beckett moved from the University of Manchester to Yahoo! in October 2005. It is interesting to see Yahoo! hiring SemWeb people and reportedly using them on SemWeb projects.

The most interesting talk (to me) was on a new repository for OWL data called OWLIM [2]. The talk was given by primary author Atanas Kiryakov. OWLIM supports RDFS and OWL DLP and (yet another) variant he called "OWL Horst", based on a ISWC 2005 paper written by H.J. ter Horst [3].

Owl Horst is an RDFS-compatible OWL fragment which allows extensions with rules. It contains less Description Logic than OWL Lite, but more capability for rules extensibility. OWL Horst provides entailment over RDF graphs based on rules of triple patterns, with variables at any position (subject, object and/or predicate).

Atanas said that general rules extensibility in OWLIM is "possible"; which probably means that they have not exposed a generic rules engine yet. Interestingly, InverseFunctionalProperty is included as a primitive property. No cardinality constraints are included, though, which I contend limits its usefulness with ontologies dealing with business data.

OWLIM is available as a Storage and Retrieval Layer (SAIL) for Sesame. Unfortunately, although it is Open Source (LGPL), it runs on Ontotext's TRREE engine, which is freely available but proprieary to Ontotext. OWLIM reportedly has very fast upload, and retreival/query speeds, but relatively slow deletes. Its scalability becomes limited with high implicit/explicit statement ratios. They claim 30 million statements as an upper limit on reasonable hardware (64-bit Opteron), 10 million on 32-bit desktops. It is written in Java 1.5. Query speeds are claimed to be linear with data size; delete time is also linear (20 sec per million statements present).

Atanas strongly encourged the Kowari team to head toward an implementation of OWL Horst instead of the OWL Lite plus full cardinality support that we planned. I will have to look into whether we could add full cardinality to OWL Horst. If we can, it sounds like a reasonable thing to do.

Steve Harris presented his recent work on implementing SPARQL in his 3Store RDF repository [4]. 3Store is written in C and uses mySQL as a storage backend. Steve has managed to auto-generate reasonable SQL from SPARQL to allow 3Store to handle some tens of millions (up to 35 million) of RDF statements. He did not implement SPARQL's nested optional, nested union or case-insensitive regexps, but that still makes it nearly complete with the SPARQL specification.

I am sure that Steve's work will come in really handy for Oracle, if they look at it. No one from Oracle was in attendance.

Denis Ranger from Mind Alliance presented his work with Jean-Francois Cloutier on a query algorithm for scalable SemWeb P2P systems [5]. Their algorithm relies on Pastry and Scribe, both created by Microsoft Research (A non-interoperable FreePastry implementation has been released under a BSD-like license from Rice University.) Data routing is handled by Pastry; peers are connected to a small set of neighbors and the connections are rebalanced automatically as peers come and go. Scribe provides publish and subscribe message- and topic-handling. They are working on a simulation and I look forward to seeing it work.

It is interesting that several researchers have been using the Lehigh University Benchmark (LUBM) data to benchmark OWL-oriented systems. It seems to be becoming a de facto standard.

References:

[1] Wood, D., Scaling the Kowari Metastore, in Dean, M., et al. (Eds.): WISE 2005 Workshops, LNCS 3807, pp. 193-198, 2005.

[2] Kiryakov, A., Ognyanov, D., and Manov, D., OWLIM- A Pragmatic Semantic Repository for OWL, in Dean, M., et al. (Eds.): WISE 2005 Workshops, LNCS 3807, pp. 182-192, 2005.

[3] ter Horst, H.J., Combining RDF and part of OWL with Rules: Semantics, Decidability, Complexity. In Proc of ISWC 2005.

[4] Harris, S., SPARQL Query Processing with Conventional Relational Database Systems, in Dean, M., et al. (Eds.): WISE 2005 Workshops, LNCS 3807, pp. 235-244, 2005.

[5] Ranger, D. and Cloutier, J.F., Scalable Peer-to-Peer RDF Query Algorithm, in Dean, M., et al. (Eds.): WISE 2005 Workshops, LNCS 3807, pp. 266-274, 2005.

$100 Green Machine Debuts at UN

Nicholas Negroponte and Kofi Annan demoed the Green Machine last week at the United Nations (stories at BBC, New Scientist, IEEE Spectrum). This is the coolest thing I have seen in a long, long time! It is meant to bring a reasonable level of computing to the poor children of the world.

The Green Machine is a sub-$100 laptop computer powered by a hand-cranked dynamo. It contains a simple, dual-mode bright LED screen to save power (no backlighting) and includes mesh networking capabilities to share Internet connections or just create ad-hoc networks. Naturally, it uses exclusively Open Source software, both to keep the price down and to facilitate internationalization to the world's poorest countries who are not a market force.

Professor Negroponte thinks he can get millions of these things built in short order and plans to sell them to governments, presumably opening the way for grants to help. Go, man, go!

Decent VIM RegExp Guide

I finally found a decent, readable guide to regular expressions in vim: http://www.geocities.com/volontir/. Yay!

Guitar Lessons

Well, I've done it again. Just as my life was starting to get a bit less frenetic I've taken on another project. My friend Naser took my to the Guitar Center in Fairfax and I bought a Yamaha six-string acoustic guitar. I haven't done a bit of work in the last several days, spending my time instead trying to wrap my short fingers around the eight basic chords described in Guitar Noise's Asolute Beginner series of articles. Naser is going to give me my first formal lesson on Friday.

I always thought computers were a terrible time sink. You start coding and hours just slip by. Guitars, at first glance, would seem to be worse.

Tufte Course Review

I attended a one-day course on data graphics yesterday, given by the justly-famous Edward Tufte. I highly recommend both the course and his books, but, as usual, have some comments.

The best parts of the course were his introduction to sparklines and his comments on the deleterious effects of Microsoft Powerpoint.

Tufte recommends a radical increase in the information density of documents and presentations. That gives documents and presentations more readability and assists the retention of information.

However, such a significant increase in information density means that in order to create a Tufte-approved presentation, one must take the time and effort to include all that additional information. One will not always have the time to do that. Office workers, military officers, stock traders and others in operational roles are often required to brief quickly, before ideas are fully formed. This, of course, never happens in science. Tufte notes that his first book required twelve years to write.

Blaise Pascal once apologized for writing a long letter, saying "The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter." In other words, he was saying that he did not choose to spend the time to radically increase the information density. That is an economic decision and, as we all know, all engineering is economics. Thanks to Brian S. for properly attributing the quote.

I noticed one other interesting phenomenon. At the end of the day, Prof. Tufte ended the lecture, the audience applauded and he waved. Then he basked in the applause, like a rock star or a politician. The last person I saw enjoy applause that much was Bill Clinton. Tufte has commented that his reviewers never include graphics, so here is my rendition of him basking in applause: . The image is, of course, a play on his "airport signal people".

Still, the course was interesting and thought provoking. I highly recommend it as an addendum to reading his books.

The Legacy of Rosa Parks

Bernadette went to the Capitol last night to see Rosa Parks lying in state. The Capitol Police reported that 30,000 people made it through (Bernadette left when she realized it was a six hour wait after midnight).

I have admired Mrs. Parks for one simple reason: At a time when full-grown men were scared to stand up to injustice, she did. Now I admire her more for something else. Bernadette says that only about one third of the people in line were black. Mrs. Parks managed to transcend race in America while bringing people together and that is a difficult thing.

Kowari v1.1 in Code Freeze

I am pleased to announce that Kowari v1.1 is now in code freeze. I will set up the CVS repository for v1.2 shortly.

The MP3 and Filesystem Resolvers were removed for this release due to the need to forward-port that tutorial to use the new permanent model names. It was worth it; having permanent model names which are not associated with a URL fixes several bugs and will reduce headaches for people using Kowari on laptops or any host which changes names regularly.

All test are finally passing and we are well on our way to our first real release as a project after Tucana's demise.

Refuting "Irreducible Complexity"

Bernadette and I attended a fascinating seminar at AAAS on Thursday entitled, "Evolution of Biological Complexity". It was part of AAAS's Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion (DoSER) lecture series. The speaker was Chistoph Adami, a professor of Applied Life Sciences at Keck Graduate Institute and a researcher at Cal Tech.

Prof. Adami discussed his most recent research on the Avida software, which simulates Darwinian evolution in silico. The Avida group has managed to show how complex adaptive traits can evolve using only the Darwinian algorithm via the accumulation of mutations. This is a stunning (although, in evolutionary camps, not unexpected) breakthrough in theorectical evolution.

A quick summary of the problem and its recent solution goes like this: Intelligent Designists say that certain biological features are far too complex to have been evolved using Darwin's algorithm. They (especially Lehigh University biochemistry professor Michael Behe) have claimed that since very complex structures (say, for example, the eye) rely on the simultaneous activation of many (tens, hundreds, thousands) of genes, they could not possibly evolve by successive single mutations. This is known as "irreducible complexity", because the complex nature of the structure is not thought to be reducible into a series of single mutations. Adami and Avida have shown otherwise.

Avida has been used to evolve a set of computer programs which compete for CPU time in a race to find solutions to mathematical problems. Adami presented an example of the equality operator, evolved from a series of NAND operations, which required the simultaneous activation of some 20 "genes". He then went on to dissect the history of the evolved operator, showing that it was not active until the last (single gene) mutation, but all the intermediate states were, in fact, functional. Several simpler operators (e.g. AND) were evolved and then lost on the way towards EQU. Surprisingly, the evolutionary train of mutations included several mutations which were downright harmful to the program, severely reducing its fitness. These deleterious mutations survived just long enough to pass on their genes to an offspring which was then mutated in a positive manner. Thus, an examplar structure which met all criteria for "irreducible complexity" was shown to be, in fact, both evolable and emminently reducible.

Importantly, this breakthrough specifically refutes the argument most commonly used by proponents of "Intelligent Design"; that Darwinian evolution cannot account for complex biological features. I hope that this new knowledge can be brought to bear on the recent debates regarding the teaching of evolution in US schools.

Hurricane Katrina Damage

I've been meaning to post this for a while...

My friend Kirk Benson, who served with me on USS Ouellet, is a Navy oceanographer and was responsible for forecasting weather in the New Orleans area. He lived in Slidell, Louisiana, until Hurricane Katrina blew through. Interestingly, he recommended the evacuation of Navy facilities in New Orleans and was sent to Texas before the storm.

Pictures of the damage to his house are here. It all seems a lot more real when you know someone affected.

Thomas Schelling Wins Nobel Prize for Economics

Thomas C. Schelling won this year's Nobel Prize for economics, and about time, too.

Schelling's article¹ on racial segregation, the earliest agent model of which I am aware, was what started my interest in agent modeling, finite autonoma and other ways of generating complexity from simple rules.

The University of Maryland press release is here, which points to some of his other big works. It looks like I have more reading to do...

[1] Schelling, T. 1969. “Models of Segregation.” American Economic Review 59:488-493.

Tour du monde en dansant

For anyone who likes to travel, Tour du monde en dansant is a must-see. Thanks to brownyPoints for the link.

Campbell on Memetics?

It is amazing how many scholars have had some internal model regarding the spread of ideas, and many of them seem rather close to (though few are isomorphic with) Blackmore's memes.

I was just reading in Joseph Campbell's Creative Mythology where he says, "A mythological canon is an organization of symbols, ineffable in import, by which the energies of aspiration are evoked and gathered toward a focus. The message leaps from heart to heart by way of the brain, and where the brain is unpersuaded the message cannot pass. The life then is untouched."

That could be Blackmore's memetics, except I think she would tend to say that the last sentence deviates. For, in her theory, an integration of the idea occurs, mixing either more or less with those already resident. Campbell suggests that some ideas may be completely and utterly dismissed if they contradict a functioning mythological system. I think that is worth paying some serious attention to.

Simple Humanism

The history of science may be thought of as the search for simple rules underlying complex phenomena. This search, as the last couple of hundred years clearly show, has been amazingly, even surprisingly, successful. It seems that the world is more simple at its core than we ever expected.

It is not just physics. Sure, Newton ("F=ma"), Laplace (Nature produces "a great number of phenomena, often very complicated, by of a small number of general laws"), Einstein ("E=mc²") and others lead the way, but our contemporaries are busily extending the concept to many other fields. Stephen Wolfram's finite autonoma have sought to place the entire physical world on a simpler footing. Dawkins and Gould extended Darwin's evolution and made it, if anything, simpler. Joseph Campbell found simple underlying rules in worldwide human mythologies. Susan Blackmore, extending Dawkins, is trying to do it for ideas themselves.

I have started to wonder about humanism as a simplification. Humanism would seem to be an expansion of a human world view due to a simplification of the idea of creation. Humanism places humans again in the center of the perceived universe, capable of creating their own world views and solely responsible for their execution. The cause for this shift in perception is directly tied to the successes of simplification in other fields. It worked for physics, biology, economics, so why not God?

Of course, simple (there's that word again) economics tells us that relying on innate human reactions without long term planning (the Tragedy of the Commons) is a quick road to disaster in an economy based on scarcity. Humanism, therefore, is not a silver bullet to solving the world's problems. It just may allow us, though, to look at our problems more clearly and encourage us, however slightly, to plan for our long term survival instead of awaiting Armageddon to clean up our mess.

All that Glitters does not, err, SPARQL

I was asked to review and comment on the specification for the SPARQL Query Language for RDF. The full review is here.

In short, I am impressed that the DAWG was able to produce a specification, but I can't help being disappointed in the results.

The Kowari community plans to implement it anyway, since it will become the standard RDF query language, but will have to extend it significantly. The iTQL language will remain the same, but will be deprecated as of the Kowari release which includes a SPARQL implementation extended to include all iTQL features. There is much discussion whether that is indeed practical.

Dates for Kowari 1.1 Release

Kowari version 1.1 dates of interest:

Code slush	10 October 2005
Code freeze	17 October 2005
Documentation freeze	10 December 2005
Release	2 January 2006

No code changes will be accepted after the code slush unless they impact currently open bugs of priority 8 or greater. Code changes submitted after the code freeze will be applied to a new CVS branch for the following version.

Northrop Tucana Web Site Up and Running

Northrop Grumman has put up a Northrop-branded Tucana Web site. It is basically Tucana Technologies' old site for the moment with a bit of cleaning, but it is a very positive start for their marketing campaign. www.tucanatech.com now redirects to Northrop.

Northrop Grumman Press Release re Tucana Acquisition

Northrop Grumman Corporation (finally) announced the purchase of Tucana Technologies' intellectual property.

SPARQL Protocol Review and Comments

I just reviewed the SPARQL Protocol for RDF working draft, now in Last Call at the W3C. The full review is here, but here's a summary:

"It is my (personal) opinion that this document is not ready for publication until the WSDL 2.0 compliance issue in Section 2.2 is resolved. The phrase 'DAWG acknowledges the risk inherent in describing its protocol in an illegal variant of WSDL 2.0' is not sufficient to relieve the working group of its responsibility for interoperability. Indeed, if this specification were to be published without resolution of this issue, I think it is quite likely that WSDL 2.0 implementations would not change to reflect it. That would materially damage the SPARQL Protocol's likelihood of uptake."

Korean Defense Service Medal

The US Department of Defense announced the creation of the Korean Defense Service Medal (KDSM). The KDSM is a service medal for those who have served in the Republic of Korea. Since I meet the criteria about ten times over, my rack now looks like this:



Of course, I'll never wear it, but I might hang it in my office with the others. It's strange how much that simple recognition of all those damn cold nights on the far side of the world means to me. The Cold War was rarely hot, but it sure was uncomfortable. I think of those days as the most rewarding of my life, when I was closest to history in the making. I sure am glad I waited to have children, though. It was hell on families.

For the record (when my kids read this 30 years from now), the thing on top is a US Navy Surface Warfare Officer (ship driver) qualification. The one on the bottom is a Deep Sea Diving Officer qualification. The ribbons are (from upper left to bottom right): Navy Commendation Medal, Air Force Achievement Medal, Navy Battle Efficiency Ribbon (3 awards), National Defense Service Medal, Korean Defense Service Medal and Navy Sea Service Deployment Ribbon (4 awards).

Memetic Iteration Via Selective Focus

I've been thinking a lot recently about the way that memes change. If Richard Dawkins is right about ideas following an evolutionary algorithm ("memes") and Sue Blackmore is right about the mind being an imitation machine (thus being the home and replicator of memes), then we have to start wondering about the cause of copying errors. After all, errors in replication are key to the evolutionary algorithm. In genetics, the cause seems to be mutation via statistical failures during replication or induced errors afterwards (e.g. by radiation). What is the cause of memetic errors in imitative replication?

I think I found a clue to that last night. It was my wife's birthday and she was opening her presents and reading cards from family and friends. When she read the card from me out loud, my son keyed on a sentence regarding him and burst out, "Hey, Dad, why did you say that?" That was the clue: Aidan heard the entire content of the card, but reacted strongly to only a small portion of it. When asked, his recollection of the card was restricted to the part about him. He missed the main theme because it simply wasn't important to him.

Is selective focus, driven by our own self interest, the key to memetic iteration? I suspect so. It certainly seems to correspond to political spin doctoring (where spin doctors try to find just the right way to describe a situation, self interest being the driving factor), and perhaps even fads. In the creation of fads, each individual seeks to iterate a (generally simple) idea until it strikes the right cord (as determined by positive feedback from onlookers), then it replicates relatively freely. It may change again, as it is picked by people with different ideas of what the right cord is. Marketers, like politicians, try to engineer such phenomena. Therein lies the real danger of a proper science of memetics; if we really get the point of having a full theory, the potential for abuse is much more dangerous than Paul Davies suggests.

SPARQL Support Coming for JRDF

Tom has been working on SPARQL support for JRDF and has posted a good status update.

SPARQL could be in JRDF as early as the 0.4 release, which would pave the way for SPARQL in a later release of Kowari. Of course, iTQL still has many more features than SPARQL and there will be some difficulties mapping the two. I still want iTQL to turn into a SPARQL+ (and even - where appropriate, such as UNSAID, unless the DAWG drops it as they are rumored to be considering). I like to think of the future of iTQL's relationship to SPARQL as being analogous to PL/SQL's relationship to the SQL standard. Only time will tell if we can pull that off, but I am hopeful. That approach will require much more than supporting SPARQL in JRDF.

Kowari Memory Leak Found and Fixed

Chris Wilper and his team at The Fedora Project have been embedding Kowari within Fedora for some time. They recently uncovered a memory leak which is caused by a failure to properly clean up unused FreeList$Phase objects in one of the FreeList constructors. The problem shows up when doing many inserts and deletions. Chris quickly tracked down the cause and submitted a patch. Paul G has looked at it, albeit briefly, and will write a test to catch the problem. I expect that Chris' patch will be committed to the Kowari CVS shortly.

All Kowari and Tucana Knowledge Server users should take note of this one! The memory leak exists in both the Kowari 1.0 series and the 1.1 prereleases (including nightly snapshots from CVS), and TKS 2.0 and 2.1 (at least). I suspect (but have not yet verified) that the TKS 1.X series is also affected. The final fix will be in Kowari 1.1 when it comes out in the fourth quarter of this year.

A nice before-and-after plot shows the memory leak and the behavior following Chris' fix.

The State of Iraq

A friend currently serving with the US military in Iraq sums it up this way: "It will continue to be bloody until we kill them all, they kill us, or they discover the flush toilet and strip malls." I couldn't have said it better myself.

Paper Accepted to SSWS 2005

I wrote a (really crappy - need to fix that) paper entitled, "Scaling the Kowari Metastore", which was was accepted to the 2005 International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS 2005). SSWS 2005 will be held on 20 November 2005 in conjunction with Sixth International Conference on Web Information Engineering (WISE 2005) in New York City.

First Against the Wall

How does one earn the right to be first against the wall when the revolution comes? Easy: read and travel.

It shocked me to discover that I have acquired a reputation as a "liberal". A fellow engineer even recently referred to me as a "liberal wacko", which is apparently worse. This is in spite of my fiscal conservatism, preference for small government, and relatively hawkish views on foreign policy (though not on wars which do not serve the strategic interest of the US). Yet my childhood friends (most of whom seem to be US Marines), my father and several work colleagues have applied the term "liberal" to me in recent times. Why?

The answer would seem to be that I have travelled enough to form grounded opinions and read enough to understand more about the world than they. When asked, one criticizer complained that I had "left the country" (a reference to my living in Australia for seven years; he was apparently unaware of my three years in Japan with the US Navy.). The same person pointed to my writing that "most" aspects of Islam found distasteful in the West appear to originate in Bedouin culture and not in Sharia (an opinion I'd formed partially after reading the fatwas of Ali Gomaa, currently the Grand Mufti of Egypt). My father complained that I had spent too much time listening to the "liberal agenda" and had picked up some of their ideas, particularly in relation to the war in Iraq. In fact, my objections to the war in Iraq stem simply from the fact that I saw (and see) no strategic interest for the US in pursuing it. Hmmm.

It would seem the only way to be labeled a conservative in the US of 2005 is to agree with everything the president says. That is a dangerous and capricious form of nationalism, which worries me more than even this administration's spendthrift fiscal policies. I know, I know, I'll be first against the wall.

Perhaps Kenneth Quinnell was right when he said, "It is not a coincidence that the two fields most commonly accused of being liberal - journalism and academia - are two fields whose central purpose is the pursuit of truth."

httpRange-14: A Use Case for RDF

Ralph Swick, David Booth and I have been working on a response to the W3C Technical Architecture Group's resolution on the httpRange-14 issue ("# vs. /") as it relates to Semantic Web application developers.

Bascially, we are hoping to define how URIs in RDF statements may be grounded in the Web and still be in compliance with the httpRange-14 resolution. My message to the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group mailing list is here.

The Truth About Dissent

I have a couple of thoughts for my American friends who think that patriotism is best defined by standfast, simpleminded support for a single president's policies:

• "It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority." -- Benjamin Franklin


• "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." -- Thomas Jefferson


• "All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree." -- James Madison


• "If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." -- George Washington

Our founding fathers had it right. They knew that authority should be distrusted, even themselves. They knew that freedom of press and of speech were critical elements of our freedom. And they knew that lone voices, crying out against tyranny in whatever form, were the bastion of liberty.

A Little Help from our Friends?

The United States of America has an admirable record of sending aid overseas. We are now in desperate times ourselves in New Orleans, and lower Mississippi and Alabama. Where is foriegn aid to those areas? I have a suggestion: Let's ask our Arab friends to send us what they can afford. We could really use a whole lot of sandbags...

Kowari v1.1 Pre-release Feature Peek

Kowari version 1.1 is finally close to completion. We expect a code freeze in October, with the release following shortly thereafter. I have posted a quick overview at Sourceforge.

I LOVE being an Engineer

My 7-year-old son was recently given a set of good-quality knights and horses by my sister-in-law. The set came with a small catapult, which fired small, plastic rocks about 3 feet. Naturally, the rocks were soon lost and my son wanted it to shoot farther. With a change in the number, type and placement of the rubber bands, it will now shoot an ice cube far enough to hit the road from our front door (about 28 feet). Now that's fun!

MIND Lab's PhotoStuff Tool Now Uses Kowari

Mike Grove from UMD's MIND Lab has extended his PhotoStuff SemWeb photo-markup tool to allow metadata storage in Kowari. Metadata associated with images may be stored in either local or remote Kowari servers. If the image being edited is a JPEG, metadata may also be stored directly into the image. Metadata is associated with one or more loaded OWL ontologies. This is very cool and worth a look.

To get the new PhotoStuff with Kowari integration, use the "PhotoStuff 3.0 BETA" link from PhotoStuff Downloads.

Mike has also created a Mindswap Kowari Java Library to abstract access to Kowari. Note the automatic translation from RDQL to iTQL occurring toward the bottom of the page.

Staying at The Kendall

I just returned from the semi-annual PAW face-to-face meeting at MIT. Meeting notes are on the PAW site.

We stayed at the historic and beautiful hotel, The Kendall. Future visitors of The Kendall who are male and straight should take note that "hair purifier" is owl:sameAs shampoo and "hair protector" is owl:sameAs conditioner :)

Tyranny of the Majority

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." So the oft-repeated maxim sometimes attributed to George Santayana tells us. I'm pretty sure that history is being repeated in the Sunni areas of Iraq this week. Many Sunnis decided to boycott the Iraqi national assembly elections earlier this year to focus on fighting an insurgency. They are now left with little representation in the assembly writing the draft constitution. The Kurdish and Shia majority seem intent on punishing the Sunnis for their long support for, and benefits from, the reign of Saddam Hussein. This reminds me of the economic punishment of Germany after World War I, which is widely regarded to have proximately resulted in the nationalism that in turn gave us World War Two, at least in Europe.

George Wilhelm Hegel, while I'm quoting others, reminds us, "What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on its principles.", so we should hardly be surprised.

The Sunnis are very likely to be left with little natural resources, an angry populous and a continued strong US military presence. Under such conditions, the insurgency will surely get worse, not better.

Making the economic punishment worse is the religious tension. Joseph Campbell (writing way back in 1964!) correctly identified the source of such tension:

"Now it is signally a fact, signally illustrated in the history of the Levant and particularly in Judaism and Islam, that when religion is identified with a community (or, as we have expressed the idea, with a consensus), and this community, in turn, is not identified with an actual land-based socio-political organism, but with a transcendental principle embodied in the laws of a church or sect, its effects on the local secular body politic, within which it thrives but which it does does identify itself, are inevitable and predictably destructive."[1] (Emphasis mine, to make the central point easier to spot)

Almost everyone will disagree with me on this, but I think we should just admit that the UN charter, which provided the world with the idea that failed states be forced to keep their boundaries, is wrong. This admission is necessary to fix Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, probably Darfor in Sudan and definitely Afghanistan. There is nothing wrong with breaking up Iraq into smaller, stable states. If we admit that such an option exists, we can be part of the solution. We can instigate a process which leaves the Sunnis stable instead of desperate. Desperation breeds violence, more than poverty.

[1] Campbell, Joseph. Occidental Mythology, The Masks of God Volume 4, Penguin Arkana edition, 1991, page 277