The Hanover Collaboration

Generally, I think “talking tough” is bad foreign policy. Keep in mind that in every country you’ll find people who agree with you and people who don’t. Our “tough talk” tends to buttress the people who disagree with you. Apropos of Iranian elections, John Dickerson basically agrees.

Fred Kaplan makes the argument that now is a moment when talking tough to the Iranian government wouldn’t be construed as talking tough to the Iranian people. As a result, it wouldn’t necessarily be counterproductive.

If you were the President, what would you say?

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How many of you have have, while listening to the “water landing” schpiel on a major jet, scoffed something like this to yourself?

Look at this thing You really think, with those engines hanging down, we’ll maintain stability hitting the water at 200 MPH? I’m guessing the the engine that hits first gets ripped off, puts that wing (or maybe the other) deep enough in the water that it gets ripped off too, and the subsequent rotation/deceleration kill essentially everybody. Those who survive the crash mostly drown or die of hypothermia while waiting for a rescue.

Well, it turns out that it is possible to land an A320 on water, in the winter, and have everyone survive. Between the flight crew and the Airbus engineers, there are 155 lives worth of credit to go around.

I certainly am. I would be very disappointed not to see a few people (e.g. Rumsfeld) brought to trial. I am aware, however, of how much political capital this would cost the new administration. Lithwick argues that as of this moment he can no longer do nothing. Here’s what I would do if I were Obama.

I wouldn’t push the prosecution myself. Instead, I would (publicly) send all of the documentation to the Hague. At this point any country that is a party to the torture convention would be free to arrest and try them. In fact, I might (privately) hint that we would be willing to extradite people to the ICJ. I would even issue pardons if that would help the ICJ get jurisdiction.

At worst we lose a little more face for running afoul of our treaty obligation (for not arresting them ourselves) and restrict these guys from ever leaving the country. At best we get to affirm the validity of, and our adherence to, international law while at the same time sending some of these treasonous bastards to jail.

Dear America,

I know a lot of you are anti-bailout. And I can understand why— those are my tax dollars, too. But as a line worker at GM, I’ll be the first to feel the effects of my company’s collapse. So please, hear me out on why I want to keep my job at General Motors:

I want to keep working for a company that turned my labor into expensive, impractical, environmentally-destructive vehicles. I need that paycheck, because, thanks to deceptive financing, buying those vehicles has put me deeply in debt to my company’s insolvent financial arm, GMAC.

I want to keep working for a company that created, then buried the first modern production model electric car —a car that could have saved me thousands of dollars this summer when gas prices peaked above four dollars a gallon, as well cut back on greenhouse emissions, along with ozone, smog, and noise pollution in my neighborhood

I want to keep working for a company whose CEO who makes 250 times what I do. I want to keep working for a Vice Chairman of Global Product Development who called global warming a ‘total crock of shit’ and took pride in producing a hybrid that somehow gets less than 22 miles a gallon. I want them to keep their private jets.

I want to keep working for a company that funneled millions into lobbying against higher fuel economy standards, instead of pushing for the same universal health coverage that allegedly makes competition with foreign manufacturers ‘unfair’. Without that coverage, I’m pretty much forced to keep working here.

I want to keep working for a company that raked in record profits less than a decade ago, and turned the new income into innovative vehicles, like an SUV that converts into a pick-up truck, and FlexFuel systems that get equally poor mileage running on gasoline or even-less-carbon-friendly corn ethanol.

I want to keep working for a company that helped buy out and all but destroy the extensive public transportation infrastructure that existed in America in the 1930s. I might get stuck in traffic on the way to work, but at least I do it in my own car.

I want to keep working for a company that admitted in a full-page ad that it’s been ignoring the needs of the American consumer for years, but still expects us to buy their vehicles because…well, I’m not sure why.

And I especially want to keep working for a company that, over the past four decades, has dismantled the American auto industry piece by piece, outsourcing jobs, closing factories, and bringing unprecedented economic blight to what was one of America’s most promising Midwestern cities.

So please, America, write your congressman. Tell them to support the company I work for with an infusion of your tax money. Because clearly, if my loyalty to GM is indicative of anything, it’s that I’m too stupid to work anywhere else.

Sincerely,

GM Auto Workers.

Have you guys heard about this?! Basically, there is a bus full of poison that is going to fall out of the sky and we have essentially no idea where. So we’re going to say “to hell with orbital debris” and try to blow it up.

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If you don’t know about the Darpa Grand Challenge you should read about it a little first. You can probably find some good videos if you look. MIT entered for their first time this year and did remarkably well: 4th. 40 started, 11 qualified, 6 finished.

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Is the subject of the most recent “Speaking of Dartmouth” email. After reading it, all I know is that 1) it has something to do with the board of trustees and 2) I’m supposed to be mad about the lawsuit.

The lack of substance was pretty troubling. It reminded me of all the constitution mailings I got. i.e. a power grab. I can see Joran’s point that such power grabs are not necessarily bad for the college, I just don’t like when people try to manipulate me.

So with a little effort you can find out that the issue is the following. The alumni elect half the board of trustees. The board votes to add more seats to the board. Should half of those new seats be elected by the trustees or not? Jim thinks no, most of the alumni think yes.

Does anyone know how this problem came to be? If half of the board is responsive to the alumni, how could the other half manage to push such a thing through? And if there is dispute within the board, it should certainly be resolved within the current membership as opposed to after one side has granted themselves extra votes. So it would seem, I too advocate an injunction. I imagine that such would not severely “harm” the college or if it did, I hope it wouldn’t be “immeasurable” nor be too much of a “distraction … to the students faculty and staff”, or be “wildly expensive”.

Background: The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly called the “Tamil Tigers” in the States, is a seperatist-terrorist organization in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is a West Virginia sized island nation just of the south-east tip of India, with a population of about 20 million. The particulars of the LTTE’s (as I will call them in preference to “Tamil Tigers” so as to seem sophisticated and international) motivation and the righteousness or heinousness of their cause where not discernible in the amount of time I have alloted for this post. Let it be said, however, that the LTTE is not Muslim, and does not seem to discriminate against women. The LTTE wants an independant state in the northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka, where the Tamil people are in the majority. The Sri Lankan government thinks that “regional autonomy” should be good enough.

Recent news: It appears that the LTTE now have an air force. It is believed they smuggled parts for somewhere between one and five Zlin-143s, a Czech small (one non-turbo prop, two seats) airplane, into the jungle where the planes where reassembled and a secret 650 meter runway constructed. The aircraft were then rigged with makeshift external bomb racks.

The Sri Lankan government has itself a real air force, with supersonic fighters an intercepts made in China, Russia, and Israel. I don’t know how hard it is to shoot down a light aircraft from a supersonic interceptor. It might be easy, it might be hard. I wouldn’t be surprised either way.

Three times in the past month the LTTE air craft have taken off under the cover of night and bombed targets in Sri Lanka. The targets have been the national airport, a fuel storage depot, and a military base. Unlike some other governments, the Sri Lankans were able to respond to the aerial bombardment with anti-aircraft fire. Just like some other governments might, the Sri Lankans also immediately bombarded “rebel targets” somewhere in the jungle that may or may not have had airplanes at them.

I bring this up because I think jungle gorilla fighters with smuggled and re-assembled home made bombers is news more interesting than anything going on in the US right now.

Dartmouth just won the NCAA skiing championship. Something like 9 All-Americans. The last time Dartmouth won was 1976 and that was a tie. Before that it won in 1958. Surprise of the season, Lindsay Mann won the second run of the slalom and came in 4th.

A rule change this year means that every skiers’ score counts while in the past, you could throw out your worst two results. This meant that a team of 11 wasn’t at as much of a disadvantage. Notably DU had a team of 11 this year (so their score is the same as it would have been under the old rules). Looking to see which scores we would ave thrown out, it is obvious that everybody was totally solid. Our worst results were 17 and 21 pts, 23rd and 19th respectively. Those are good worsts to have. Anyway, without those 38 pts, today would have been a lot more of a nail-biter, but Dartmouth still would have won.

Everybody is talking about the Bush Admin taking a step back and deciding to go to the FISA court with it’s wiretapping program. None of the mainstream outlets seem to appreciate that what FISA does is give out warrants for wiretaps. What the NSA is doing is data mining. Unless FISA starts giving out warrants addressed to everybody, it’s not going to work.

Well, Slate noticed.

Slashdot ran a feature today chronicling something of an anti-simplicity backlash in the design world. Several important points were made, but one comment, by alleged design guru Don Norman, is absolutely bathed in idiocy:

“Why are Yahoo! and MSN such complex-looking places? Because their systems are easier to use [than Google’s].”

Yeah, I know. Blog bait if I’ve even seen it. But such specious reasoning demands a swift and solid refutation.

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Oh, Sony. How you’ll soon pine for the days of Playstation I, when your marketing gurus made the loudest statement since Leisure Suit Larry that the 18+ crowd had gamers in it yet. You saw an open market, made a competent machine that was easy to develop for, and became the industrial force in a notoriously tricky field. That was 1996; ten years later, your outlook is bleak. Continue...

I finally found a job. I’m doing “development” for a company that is trying to do content management for high school and college kids. Think Blackboard or OpenCourseWare plus Myspace or Facebook but with more emphasis on collaboration e.g. posts/comments, forums or Wiki-style pages.

That is pretty darm broad. Right now we are still feeling out markets, as in “Who are the users going to be?” and “How do we make money.” Next (at the same time, really) we have to figure out what they’re going to want¹.

The point of this is to ask for your ideas. I’ll have more specific questsions later but for now let’s just go with,

1. Tell me about your dream site and,
2. Tell me whether or not you were particularly pleased or displeased by anything in something that you use[d] (which for me might include, Blackboard, OCW, Facebook, Myspace, Blogger, Wordpress, Textpattern, MediaWiki, DokuWiki, Plone).

Thank you, I eagerly await your rants.

¹ long digression In the software biz this is called “Requirements”, the phase when you decide on functionality. The next phase is “Design” where you say how you intend to meet the requirements. Finally the “Design” is translated into something codable, for instance, object design, protocol descriptions, timing diagrams etc. Then at the end, somebody writes some code.

For most people, the salaries involved with these tasts are somewhat counter-intuitive. The coding end is the end that looks like “work” while just imagining how it is going to work looks like the sort of stuff you dream up on a Sunday afternoon. But the money says that’s not right.

In fact, the hard end is the requirements. After that it is more or less a matter of translation. The closer you get to the coding end, the more mechanical this translation becomes. (The base level of coding has been handled by the compiler for decades. And the line is being pushed upward—for instance the auto-generation of code from UML).

It’s true that the translation implies an amount of refinement—to code something you need to be able to specify it with mathematical precision. At the same time, I would counter that at the coding end, the development cycle is much more tolerant of errors. This is because coding errors are of limitted scope and can be relatively easily fixed. On the other hand, an error at the design level might require than a large section of the code be redone and an error at the requirements level is typically fatal to the entire project.

Happy election day, everyone! Here’s the email I just sent to my friends around town: mostly a heads up that there is a tricky amendment.

I’m just writing to let you guys know how lucky you are to be living New Hampshire’s second congressional district, which looks like it will be a tight race between incumbent Republican Charlie Bass and Democrat challenger, Paul Hodes.

The voting is at the Middle School which is north on route 10, across from CRREL. Any of you can borrow my car to go vote. key location deleted

Also there are two amendments to know about. The first one is to prevent eminent domain takings for private usage (i.e. to counter the New London Supreme Court case) and should be an easy call. The second one is about dealing with reapportionment and was pretty tedious. It looks prudent except for that it looks game-able (perhaps deliberately so). Given the current problems with gerrymandering, I wish I was better prepared to know if it represented an improvement or not. I’ll give you some links.
vote yes
vote no

I was looking into getting a wireless guitar controller before Guitar Hero II comes out when I notice that Lik-Sang has been shut down. For those of you not geeky enough to know, Lik-Sang is where you go to import the games and electronics that you can only get in Asia¹.

I stopped reading slashdot ages ago, but I figured they would have interesting things to say. Well, they had okay links at least.

The stuff about certifications etc. is so obviously crap that it’s tedious that they would even mention it. Make no mistake, this is not a win for the consumer. The part that matters are the “rights” parts. Sony has “rights” to dictate where their products are and aren’t allowed to physically be?! There is now a new class of legally enforcable intellectual property called “Design Rights”? I thought that the DVD region code was bad. This could end up worse.

¹ People around here think that they are getting the most cutting edge stuff, like the USA is the technology capital of the world. In fact, we are often getting the dumbed down version. If you’ve ever tried to use a blackberry in a way that wasn’t intended, you’d know what I mean.