Well.

In case you haven’t read, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 passed the Senate on a roll-call vote by 65 to 34, with one abstention. Put briefly, this bill suspends most of the Constitution, stating that anyone not a citizen may be arrested and tried under military law, absent the rights to challenge evidence, have counsel of their choosing, call witnesses, or challenge the basic cause for their detention under habeas corpus. Conviction is by a majority vote of the military commission under secret ballot; they may be appealed to a military appeals court, and thence to a civilian court. (Note that this is a bit milder than some of the previous situation, in that it only affects non-Citizens; but note also that the key provision of the 14th amendment is that the rights stated under the Constitution apply to all persons, not only to citizens. This was instated soon after the Civil War, when freed blacks were persons but not citizens. You may notice that the executive branch also has the ability to strip citizenship)

Sections 7 and 8 effectively give blanket immunity to US personnel for charges of war crimes, specifically w.r.t. the Geneva Conventions. Basically, it redefines the War Crimes Act to allow whatever the President says. (Sec. 8.a.3 of this bill)

Some good news: This isn’t the first time our country has suspended the Constitution in some wholly unconstitutional manner; each time it was realized and reverted a few years later. I suspect that the same will happen here, after our current President — may his name and his memory be erased — is gone and the Congress cleaned up as well. It’s very important to do that, soon, before (more) lasting damage is done: remember to vote in this coming election, no matter where you are, and if you can contribute to electoral races, do so. And next election. And the one after that.

(On the subject of lasting damage: No real developments in the Arar case since the Canadian government’s report. Apparently they admit that they mistakenly tagged him as a terror suspect and gave this information to the US; the US promptly shipped him off to Syria to be tortured. The Canadian government apologized. But that doesn’t answer the basic question of where the safety checks went that would keep a single mistaken identification from sending someone off to a torture chamber for a year — isn’t this precisely why we have a rule of law?)

Published in: on September 29, 2006 at 10:50  Comments (52)  
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Random snippets from work

Things which will probably make sense only to other computer people.

One of the things I do at work is code readability reviews, which are the intense initial reviews that everyone has to get before they’re allowed to check anything in. (Style correctness, etc) I just noticed that one of the people doing Python readability reviews is Guido van Rossum.

From a thread at work:

> So this is undefined behavior, and the compiler is free to do
> _anything_, including always returning 0x1234

Language lawyers and compiler people are always threatening to do
things like this when standards call for undefined behavior, but they
never actually do it. The world would be a much more fun place (and
we’d probably find more latent bugs) if gcc had a –psychotic mode.

Truer words were never spoken.

Published in: on September 28, 2006 at 12:31  Comments (13)  
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Random news bits for the day

Politics: Riots in Hungary, a military coup in Thailand. (Random note about the latter: when we were in Thailand a few months ago, I told that it was good that we went then, since there had been unrest a few months before and there was going to be a coup by October. I don’t actually know much of anything about Thai politics; it was clear enough that picking up the paper a few times and staring out the window was information enough to tell. It’s too bad there isn’t an obvious way to do something useful with “there will be a coup here on such a date” information, apart from the usual “get you and everyone you care about out of the way.”)

Israel says it will pull the last of its troops from Lebanon by this weekend. At some point I’ll write a big post about all of the politics around this, really.

Potentially (much) more important news: Major openings forming in the Arctic ice sheet. They quote Mark Drinkwater of the European Space Administration as saying that the North Polar Sea should be seasonally navigable in 10-20 years. Key conclusion: If you can get your hands on land way up North, especially useful sea ports, now would be a good time. There will be shipping traffic there, there will be oil exploration, and if James Lovelock’s really gloomy predictions come to pass, it may be some of the most pleasant real estate left on the planet 100 years from now…

And your oddball news: A recent study of almost 25k women with breast implants showed that they did not have a significantly higher mortality rate than women without them. They did, however, have a 73% higher suicide rate than the population as a whole.

Published in: on September 19, 2006 at 17:34  Comments (14)  
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Some fun reading

An article from the Cato Institute titled Doublespeak and the War on Terrorism. A nice little summary of what our government has been turning into.

Published in: on September 13, 2006 at 13:48  Comments (6)  
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Still no time to write the big politics post summarizing the Lebanon War; I’ll get to that soon, really. In the meantime, here’s a post by Brad Hicks with a good update on some stuff from Pakistan.

Published in: on September 6, 2006 at 10:31  Comments Off on  
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From a chat thread at work tonight:

“We’re engineers. we don’t always need to know why black magic works, we just sacrifice the chickens and hope for the best.”

Yup, one of those nights.

Published in: on September 5, 2006 at 21:37  Comments (14)  
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At a rate of what?

The latest quarterly Pentagon report on Iraq was released today. (NYTimes story) It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear that things are bad; Iraqi casualties went up 50% relative to last quarter. One number that particularly struck me is that total Iraqi casualties have reached 120 per day.

Think about this for a moment. If a terrorist action, or set of terrorist actions, were to kill 120 people in the United States, consider what the news would be like, what the inquests would be like, how long it would be remembered for. This has now reached the level of daily occurrence.

Technical aside: When trying to interpret the impact of this, we really need to scale things to the size of the population. The real number that affects the public as a whole in a mass casualty event is the average number of degrees of separation between a random person and a person affected. Simply scaling the number of people affected linearly — the US has ten times the population of Iraq, it’s as if 1200 people were killed here — is incorrect, since as groups get smaller you’re more likely to know someone else in it. Does someone know a good result on mean distance in very large social networks?

Published in: on September 1, 2006 at 16:03  Comments (6)  
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Things to do with your time

Shakespeare Santa Cruz is putting on a fantastic production of King Lear. It’s still going for another week. Well worth the trek over the hill.

Published in: on August 28, 2006 at 12:22  Comments Off on Things to do with your time  
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Sumer and Egypt

I recently picked up a very interesting volume of ancient Near Eastern primary texts of various sorts. It’s got a bit of everything: mortuary texts, legal documents, letters, ostraka, hymns, temple rituals, legends. There’s even an old Sumerian lullaby from about 4,000 years ago. The purpose of the book, according to its incipit, is both to provide sources relevant to the work of Old Testament scholars (that being the main category of Near East scholars when the first edition was written) and to provide enough other works to give you a feel for the context of the time.

Something I’ve been noticing while reading through this is how different the various cultures feel. The Hittites come off as warlike: not only do they have a lot of documents about war (that might be simple selection bias), but their approach to it is far more gung-ho than the others’. Not in a good way, in a “we like to kill people” sort of way. The Egyptian texts feel far more foreign than I expected: part of this is because they come so predominantly from tombs, but the culture seems to look towards a political center much more than any of the others. Even by comparison to royal texts from other lands, that country seems dominated by the overwhelming power of a single political entity. The Sumerian and Akkadian texts, on the other hand, feel almost familiar; the stories and concerns of the people feel like they wouldn’t be out of place today.

I suspect that this is because we (I?) actually have a good deal more continuity of culture with the Sumerians. The Jews started out there, and came back later in Babylonian days; their old customs and ours are pretty hard to tell apart. And despite the fact that in history class we hear far more about the ancient Egyptians, we don’t actually have much culture in common with them, and it’s not clear that anyone really does; the break between the culture of the Middle Kingdom and the culture of Greek, and later Roman, Egypt was pretty deep. Whatever their powers may have been, the Ptolemies were no Pharaohs.

There’s something very odd about reading texts from an old place, and realizing that they don’t feel foreign to you. The world suddenly feels like it has some sort of structure. But I suppose that this firm an anchoring in history may be where a lot of the Middle East’s problems come from in the modern day, too.

Published in: on August 24, 2006 at 10:06  Comments (4)  
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Bits of good news, for once

Again, not yet the big politics post. Instead, some interesting things:

Grigory Perelman declined the Fields Medal, as he has declined a host of other honors and awards in the past, for his proof of Thurston’s Geometrization Conjecture. This conjecture basically states that there are eight basic pieces, and some simple surgery rules, out of which all possible three-dimensional compact surfaces can be built, and therefore we can classify all 3D compact surfaces. A compact surface is roughly speaking one that fits into a finite region; for example, in two dimensions, the surface of a sphere is compact, as is the surface of a donut, but a flat plane isn’t. Proving Thurston’s Conjecture also proves the Poincaré Conjecture, which roughly states that the only 3D compact surface that has no holes in it that you could wrap a string around (like you could wrap a string around the inner hole of the surface of a donut, and it couldn’t shrink because it would get “caught”) is a 3-dimensional sphere. It’s a major problem in mathematics that has been open for over a century, and Thurston’s conjecture is a regular tool of various fields of physics and applied math.

And perhaps even more excitingly, a smoking gun for the existence of Dark Matter has been found. A team pointed the Chandra X-ray observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and various other telescopes at a place where two clusters of galaxies had collided and gone through each other. They could clearly see that the “luminous” part of the galaxies had gone past one another and were well-separated, but 90% of the mass — as visible by its gravitational effects on light — was somehow still in the middle, and completely transparent. Apparently, the luminous matter had kept on going, but there was so much dark matter that the two big lumps from each galaxy cluster had rammed into each other and come to a stop. This confirms the existence of what’s technically known as non-baryonic cold dark matter. “Dark” means that it isn’t luminous or visible to the eye; “cold” means that it isn’t a gas of photons or neutrinos, since those disperse much more quickly; “non-baryonic” means that it isn’t made of any ordinary kind of matter, and we know that because of how transparent it is relative to its mass. (In fact, its transparency tells us that whatever it is doesn’t interact electromagnetically very much, or perhaps at all.) Previous investigations have suggested that the universe is about 70% dark energy (which is not visible to the eye, but unlike dark matter, doesn’t form clumps or shapes; it’s just uniformly spread out), 27% dark matter, and 3% luminous matter; this experiment confirms the dark matter / luminous matter ratio, and all previous hypotheses about the dark matter, very beautifully.

Now, the next question is just what it is made of…

Published in: on August 22, 2006 at 10:23  Comments (4)  
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