I am, I confess, a geek.
Just got back from an excellent company holiday party, held in the Computer History Museum. Apart from the general party itself (which had much to recommend it – food, music, interesting people, a trampoline) there were the actual exhibits.
This place is simply neat. I need to go there again sometime and look at things more carefully – they’ve got an amazing collection of everything from an Altair 8800 to pieces of ENIAC to the first CDC6600 to a whole array of bizarre things Apple has built over the years. (The 20th anniversary Mac, a Lisa, a 128k, a PowerBook 170 done entirely in primary-colored plastic especially for a Japanese golf tournament…)
They also, oddly enough, have the very first computer I ever had a UNIX account on. Not one of the same model – the computer itself.
Hmm. I wonder if my password still works on it… 🙂
Ground-level intelligence
[politics, mostly just shaking head at odd behavior and useless news stories]
An article today in the NY Times informing us that hostile forces in Iraq are acquiring intelligence information about the comings and goings of various people they would like to gak by hanging out on street corners and watching, and similar reasonably straightforward means, and that this isn’t difficult because we’ve got a large footprint for pretty much everything we do there.
No shit?
The only thing that really caught my eye in this was this line:
The American-led alliance’s intelligence system “continues to get better every day in theater, and we receive credible information which assists us in pre-empting potential attacks against our soldiers,” a military officer said.
Sounds like an awfully defensive position whence to be planning one’s intelligence operations. In fact, that sounds a lot like someone thinking in terms of a siege mentality. I sincerely hope that sort of mindset isn’t too widespread among the American forces there, or we’re going to be in for a lot of trouble quickly.
Hrm.
So the GOP is airing its first campaign ad of the new election season, and it urges people at one point to “support the president’s policy of pre-emptive self defense.”
The following is not only politically oriented, but shows my party affiliation pretty strongly. You have been warned.
Random music
So half an hour of sitting and futzing with the piano has produced a pretty neat cadenza for the end of Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2. (Based rather loosely on some notes of Chopin that are reproduced in the back of my edition of the music, together with a rather unhelpful explanation in German, which – after deciphering it with the aid of a German-speaking friend – turns out to be almost completely incomprehensible in any language.)
And I just realized that it’s only 9:30, so I can spend some time working more on this without waking my neighbors.
BTW, if anyone’s been trying to reach me over e-mail today – my e-mail server seems to have been mostly down since this morning, so I haven’t gotten any messages. No, I’m not ignoring you. 🙂
So – back to the piano with me! Wahahaha!
Sheesh….
Apparently, there’s a resolution in the UN that wants to reward Iran for its recent openness about its nuke program, and just forget about the past 20 years of its running it covertly. (Story here) Apparently, if we’re nice to them now, they’ll stop trying to build nuclear missiles.
Greeks and sex
(No, this is not another post about buggery)
Put up your weapon in the sheath. We two
shall mingle and make love upon our bed.
So mutual trust may come of play and love.(Kirke to Odysseus; Odyssey, X:375-7, Fitzgerald’s translation)
This line popped up in a fortune today, and I remembered that it really struck me last time I read the Odyssey.
Random thoughts
Interesting…
[politics]
It looks like Iran has finally agreed to suspend uranium enrichment, after first agreeing, then backing out of the agreement, and then delaying a few weeks.
Hypothesis: they wanted to delay a few weeks to get their enrichment program to a checkpoint state before any inspection regime started. Purpose could be to get it into a state where it could easily be resumed, or to get it into a state where it’s no longer obvious to inspectors. This suggests that their nuclear weapons program could be farther along than is commonly known.
Lovely line…
From an FAS report (interesting read) on the potential use of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles against passenger aircraft, a little bit of bureaucratese:
“the penalties of dropping incendiary flares on populated areas near airports are prohibitive.”
Well, I certainly can’t argue with that.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 