obfuscated.org

That Noam Chomsky and his wacky ideas. Doesn’t he know that might makes right and playing nice with others never gets you anywhere? Sheesh!

One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: “They present solutions, but I don’t like them.” In addition to the proposals that should be familiar about dealing with the crises that reach to the level of survival, a few simple suggestions for the United States have already been mentioned: 1) accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court; 2) sign and carry forward the Kyoto protocols; 3) let the UN take the lead in international crises; 4) rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror; 5) keep to the traditional interpretation of the UN Charter; 6) give up the Security Council veto and have “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” as the Declaration of Independence advises, even if power centres disagree; 7) cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending. For people who believe in democracy, these are very conservative suggestions: they appear to be the opinions of the majority of the US population, in most cases the overwhelming majority. They are in radical opposition to public policy. To be sure, we cannot be very confident about the state of public opinion on such matters because of another feature of the democratic deficit: the topics scarcely enter into public discussion and the basic facts are little known. In a highly atomised society, the public is therefore largely deprived of the opportunity to form considered opinions.

Scott Sehlhorst writes a rather fine article on strategies for testing software that’s difficult to test. Telling is that he leads with a Kent Beck quote: “If testing costs more than not testing then don’t do it.” This certainly goes contrary to the “test everything!” mantra that — usually correctly — goes around the software world. I think it’s important to consider that sometimes you just can’t test everything, but even then there are ways as described in the article to mitigate that.

Have you ever been on a project where the manager said something like, “I demand full testing coverage of the software. Our policy is zero tolerance. We won’t have bad quality on my watch.”?

What we struggle with here is the lack of appreciation for what it means to have “full coverage” or any other guarantee of a particular defect rate.

There are no absolutes in a sufficiently complex system–but that’s ok. There are statistics, confidence levels, and risk-management plans. As engineers and software developers, our brains are wired to deal with the expected, likely, and probable futures. We have to help our less-technical brethren understand these concepts–or at least put them in perspective.

I’d put off reading about el Presidente’s signing statements because, honestly, I’d rather just wait until the coronation to find out that he’s abolished congress and the supreme court and declared himself emperor for life. Anyway, this joyful little nugget appeared as part of the Boston Globe’s piece on W’s executive signing orders.

Dec. 30: When requested, scientific information ”prepared by government researchers and scientists shall be transmitted [to Congress] uncensored and without delay.”

Bush’s signing statement: The president can tell researchers to withhold any information from Congress if he decides its disclosure could impair foreign relations, national security, or the workings of the executive branch.

This from the guy who supports the teaching of the horriffically harmful pseudoscience intelligent design and takes the word of a science fiction author over that of the science research community. Why do people still stand behind this guy? Seriously. How can one say that they care abour or even vaguely understand the importance of science to this nation or the world as a whole and not denounce this raving lunatic?

It’s funny because it’s true.

Frobes published a wonderful battle cry for people with healthy attitudes about work and life.

Every month, the U.S. Labor Department releases another jobs report that becomes fodder for the financial press. Yay, we created 138,000 new jobs! Yet nobody ever seems to ask if people actually, you know, like the jobs that have been created. The oft cited but never seen observer from Mars would think that work is the point of American life. But the aesthetics of life are far more important than whether or not a PowerPoint presentation was finished on time. In order to contemplate and enjoy life as art, people need time to be lazy.

Amen, brother! What ever happened to work as something that you just happen to do during the week to pay your bills? Why does it have to be the defining thing in a person’s life? I can understand that for some people it is, and sure, fine, that’s good for them. Where would we be without the artist totally dedicated to their craft or the activist who lives their cause 24/7? The junior project manager putting together Gantt charts over the weekend or the programmer flipping bits for somebody else’s company late in to every night, however, I would argue that we could do without.

I don’t think either that this should be taken in a “stick it to the man” sense. When people take the proper time to be lazy, it would in all likelihood make them even more productive at their jobs. People are inherently creative creatures, but they need inspiration for anything to come of it. There’s little inspiration in a daily cycle of Wake -> Work -> American Idol -> Sleep. When people are out actually living or thinking — “being lazy,” as the article would call it — there’s more room for inspiration, and everybody — family, self, employer, etc. — comes out on top.

The article goes on to address that black plague of modern work, the pager/cell phone/PDA/etc.. Yep, they’re awful, but then they’re also necessary sometimes. Sometimes you are the only person who can restart that one server or know who that one vendor is. However, even when they aren’t necessary, there seems to be a lot more “hooray, a device to make it easier for me to work during my free time” than “oh no, I’m tethered to the office 24/7.” Somehow work has even gained precedence over life in the off hours, and that can’t be good. The most healthy attitude I ever heard towards the 24/7 office leash was from a CTO candidate I was interviewing at a dot-com startup a few years ago. He said that he was more than happy to wear a pager as he understood that it was necessary, but that he wanted to be afforded every opportunity to make sure that it never went off. Bravo, good sir. As the article says, “being lazy these days actually takes some effort.”

In the end, it’s all about balance. Is work important? Sure. Is it more important than spending time with your family or your friends? Definitely not. Is it work more than setting aside a little time for yourself? Is it even advantageous in terms of how much you’ll get done in the long term to dedicate yourself heavily to work? In both cases I’d say “no” again. So blow it off. Phone it in. Stay home with a fake cold one day and read a book. You, your friends, your family and even your employer will be better off for it.

Hey look, an amusing tool to visualize web sites as graphs. Here are a few sites that I am or have been ascoiated with in one way or another over the years.

Graphs are fun. Everybody likes graphs.

A study recently accepted to the Journal of Geophysical Research suggests that deliberate CFC reductions are responsible for partial recovery of the ozone layer. However, in certain circumstances, the recovery is more than can be explained by CFC reductions alone.

What they found is both good news and a puzzle.

The good news: In the upper stratosphere (above roughly 18 km), ozone recovery can be explained almost entirely by CFC reductions. “Up there, the Montreal Protocol seems to be working,” says co-author Mike Newchurch of the Global Hydrology and Climate Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The puzzle: In the lower stratosphere (between 10 and 18 km) ozone has recovered even better than changes in CFCs alone would predict. Something else must be affecting the trend at these lower altitudes.

It will be interesting to find out what caused the additional recovery. Either way, congratulations to the Montreal Protocol for mitigating what could have turned to an ugly situation.

A former NSA analyst suggests that the Bush administration’s much-loved warrantless domestic spying program could be causing more harm than good.

This scattershot attempt at data mining drags FBI agents away from real investigations, while destroying the NSA’s credibility in the eyes of law enforcement and the public in general. That loss of credibility makes the NSA the agency that cried wolf — and after so many false leads, should they provide something useful, the data will be looked at skeptically and perhaps given lower priority by law enforcement than it would otherwise have been given.

Worse, FBI agents working real and pressing investigations such as organized crime, child pornography and missing persons are being pulled away from their normal law enforcement duties to follow up on NSA leads. Nobody wants another 9/11, of course, but we experience real crimes on a daily basis that, over the course of even one year, cause far greater loss of life and damage than the 9/11 attacks did. There are children abused on a daily basis to facilitate online child pornography, yet I know of at least two agents who were pulled from their duties tracking down child abusers to investigate everyone who called the same pizza parlor as a person who received a call from a person who received an overseas call. There are plenty of similar examples.

We have snakes in our midst, yet we are chasing a mythical beast with completely unreliable evidence.

Every student should learn from Alex Halavais’ How to cheat good.

8. Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text

This is my Number 1 piece of advice, even if it is numbered eight. When you copy things from the web into Word, ignoring #3 above, don’t just “Edit > Paste” it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I’m going to guess that something odd may be going on. This seems to happen in about 1% of student work turned in, and periodically makes me feel like becoming a hermit.

We’ll never top that pesky Kahn if we don’t have cloaking technology!

Two separate teams, including Professor Pendry’s, have outlined ways to cloak objects in the journal Science.

These research papers present the maths required to verify that the concept could work. But developing an invisibility cloak is likely to pose significant challenges.

Both groups propose methods using the unusual properties of so-called “metamaterials” to build a cloak.

These metamaterials can be designed to induce a desired change in the direction of electromagnetic waves, such as light. This is done by tinkering with the nano-scale structure of the metamaterial, not by altering its chemistry.