TV Pictures Will Keep Getting Better as Pixels Multiply, Web Advances

Monday, September 13th, 2004

According to TV Pictures Will Keep Getting Better as Pixels Multiply, Web Advances, we’re within a few years of having televisions indistinguishable from reality:

International Business Machines makes a 22-inch display with nine million pixels — or 10 times the number in a current high-definition TV set. It’s a specialized device for the engineering market, and it costs $6,000. That’s a lot of money, for sure, but it’s also a bargain compared with the $300,000 that the Lawrence Livermore Lab paid for the first model a few years back as an inducement to IBM to build the thing.

Mr. Bardsley says that for a 50-inch screen viewed from five feet away, nine million pixels are enough to fool the human eye. Any higher resolution would be overkill, he says, because the eye wouldn’t be able to discern the extra information.

But besides ultrahigh resolution, the perfect display would also need to have twice the possible range of colors that today’s sets have; contrast would need to be improved as well. And, of course, there would need to be a commensurate improvement in the cameras that take the pictures.

Of course, it’s a perfectly realistic two-dimensional image we’re discussing.

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

A Dog’s History of America

Monday, September 13th, 2004

Mark Derr’s A Dog’s History of America shares this darkly fascinating tidbit:

Indians, like many others, ate dogs. So apparently did the Spanish — as did many whites who became desperate for food as they worked their way to the West — but they had a crueler use for dogs: They were “specifically bred and trained to hunt down and disembowel Indians,” and the Spanish followed the “practice of bringing along on any campaign chained Indian slaves as food for the dogs.” They were known as “war dogs,” and they brought terror everywhere they went.

On a more heroic note:

“A young mother was gathering beans in front of a newly built log house when she turned to fuss at her little dog for its persistent barking and saw that it was holding at bay a cougar sitting on a stump just twenty feet from her baby. The woman hastily scooped up her child and ran into the house to wait for her husband. He soon returned with his big dog and immediately tracked and killed the cougar. He found in its stomach the remains of their brave little dog.”

Posted in Animals, War | No Comments »

Step Toward Universal Computing

Monday, September 13th, 2004

Step Toward Universal Computing reports on a new “near-universal emulator that allows software developed for one platform to run on any other, with almost no performance hit”:

Transitive Corp. of Los Gatos, California, claims its QuickTransit software allows applications to run ‘transparently’ on multiple hardware platforms, including Macs, PCs, and numerous servers and mainframes.

Yeah, but how does it perform?

In demonstrations to press and analysts, the company has shown a graphically demanding game — a Linux version of Quake III — running on an Apple PowerBook.

This isn’t entirely new:

One of the key breakthroughs is an “intermediate representation,” a kind of lingua franca that gives the software the flexibility to translate from one platform to another.

Unlike most other emulators, QuickTransit translates blocks of code rather than a line at a time. In addition, it identifies and stores the most commonly executed code.

“It’s like a translator versus an interpreter,” said lead engineer Frank Weidel. “Instead of working on every chunk of code, QuickTransit translates a sentence, or a paragraph, at a time. That’s how we get the performance.”

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Strange Patterns of Casualties in Iraq

Friday, September 10th, 2004

From Strange Patterns of Casualties in Iraq:

In Iraq, American combat losses continue at a historically low level. Since March, 2003, American troops have suffered 7,900 casualties (including 976 dead.) This is an unprecedented killed to wounded ratio of 1:7. In past wars, the ration had been 1:4 or 1:5. American combat deaths over the Summer were 42 in June, 54 in July and 66 in August. There are the equivalent of three American combat divisions in Iraq, each running several hundred patrols and other combat operations each day. Never have combat divisions, operating in hostile territory, kept their casualties this low. The news media, concentrating on any losses as the story have generally missed the historical significance of the low casualties. The American armed forces have developed new equipment, weapons and tactics that have transformed combat operations in an unprecedented way. This is recognized within the military, but is generally ignored, or misunderstood, by the general media.

The health ministry announced that 2,956 people were killed and 11,669 injured because of anti-government violence and terrorism in the last four months. That’s a death rate from the violence of 48 per year per 100,000 population. This is much higher than the death rate from crime in the United States, of 5.6 per 100,000. But lower than the rate of 58 in crime ridden South Africa. However, the rate in Iraq has more than tripled, from 15 per 100,000, earlier in the year. However, the fighting has been concentrated in a few areas, as have the casualties. Najaf, where the al Sadr gunmen fought police and American troops, and in Sunni Arab areas to the north where anti-government gunmen sought to retake control of the country. Najaf accounted for 18 percent of the dead. Baghdad accounted for 28 percent of the dead. Baghdad is the target of many terrorist attacks, as well as a large Shia population, and the source of most of the al Sadr gunmen. Baghdad was also the home of many of Sadam Hussein’s most dedicated followers. Only ten percent of the casualties are women and children (who make up some two thirds of the population), indicating that the losses are largely from anti-government forces fighting, without much success, coalition troops.

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Russia unveils Stalin spy service

Friday, September 10th, 2004

Russia unveils Stalin spy service describes “a special exhibition in Moscow [that] marks the 60th anniversary of Smersh’s founding.” What is (or was) Smersh?

The security organ, set up during World War ll, was one of the most powerful and dreaded tools of the Soviet wartime regime.

Its name, taken from the Russian Smert Shpionam, or Death to Spies, was said to have been coined by Stalin himself.

Directly subordinated to the Soviet leader, it was used to infiltrate the Nazi secret services and to enforce order and loyalty on the war front.

I didn’t realize there was a real Smersh. Ian Fleming’s early Bond stories featured SMERSH (in ALL CAPS), but the movie versions (and later stories) featured the fictional SPECTRE.

Posted in Media, War | No Comments »

On Ground in Iraq, Soldier Uses Wits To Hunt Insurgents

Friday, September 10th, 2004

On Ground in Iraq, Soldier Uses Wits To Hunt Insurgents discusses Sgt. McCary’s experiences as an intelligence officer in Iraq — now that he’s back in the states. He’s not your typical soldier:

Sgt. McCary graduated from Vassar College with a degree in French literature before enlisting in the Army in 2000. Before basic training he had never touched a gun in his life. Because he had a college degree and a knack for languages, the Army sent him to its Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., for Arabic instruction. He picked up the language so quickly that his instructors nicknamed him ‘the sponge.’
[...]
In the field, Sgt. McCary learned other critical skills. One was the ability to lie. “If you are not a Muslim brother in this culture you are nothing, so I had to construct an entirely new working persona,” he says. Though he has no Arab heritage, he tells Iraqis his mother is Lebanese. He sprinkles every conversation with asides such as “Praise be to God.” When a local says he is afraid to talk because the mujahedeen will kill him, Sgt. McCary recites a phrase commonly used in Iraq: “A good Muslim fears only one person.” Then the sergeant points to the sky. As part of the ritual, the other person says, “Allah.”
[...]
Despite the setbacks, a year in Iraq has made Sgt. McCary and his battalion a smarter, tougher, more cynical fighting force. The same tank commanders who had never worked with a counterintelligence soldier before now go out of their way to request his presence on raids and patrols. Sgt. McCary’s battalion commander nominated him recently for the Bronze Star.

“You couldn’t design a better counter-insurgent,” says Maj. John Nagl, who is third in command of Sgt. McCary’s battalion. “He’s interested in other cultures, willing to question his own beliefs and mores.”

Posted in Education, War | No Comments »

Germ Study Suggests Bloodletting May Work

Friday, September 10th, 2004

Bacteria thrive on iron, which is why the “barbaric” custom of bloodletting may have worked. From Germ Study Suggests Bloodletting May Work:

University of Chicago microbiologists report Thursday in the journal Science that the staph germ — a leading cause of pneumonia and other infections — fuels itself with iron in a previously unknown way.

Early in staph infections, the germs blow open red blood cells. The Chicago researchers found staph then snatches their oxygen- and iron-carrying component, called heme, and discovered the genes that govern the process.

When they weakened those genes, staph no longer sickened worms or mice, said lead researcher Eric P. Skaar. Next step is hunting drugs to block staph’s iron-stealing ability.
[...]
Now derided as a nonsensical if not barbaric custom, bloodletting was abandoned in the mid-20th century after antibiotics were invented.

But the mystery persists: “How could a procedure popular for 2,500 years have really been completely worthless?” Rouault asked.

Bloodletting was used for lots of reasons, many that “didn’t make good sense,” she stressed. But, searching old medical texts, she found that starting in 18th-century France, certain physicians advised it only at the start of a high-fever illness. Even in 1942, medicine’s leading English-language textbook advised early bleeding for high-fever pneumonia.

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War Games

Thursday, September 9th, 2004

Back in October of 1991, Dave Kopel & Glenn Reynolds wrote about the Afghans’ supposed martial prowess — and Americans’ supposed lack of martial prowess. They pointed to Americans’ (or American geeks’) experience with War Games:

So here’s the funny thing. While the official American culture around, say, 1977, was revolted by anything military, a bunch of the nation’s smartest young males — the “leaders of tomorrow” — were reading Panzer Leader and Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart’s Strategy, and of course Sun Tzu’s Art of War — which wargamers were reading long before it became a business-school cliché.

This was no accident. Many of those who founded the wargame publishing business feared that, with the anti-militarism caused by the Vietnam, and (later) with the adoption of the all-volunteer army, American society would become estranged from all things military, leaving ordinary citizens too ignorant to make meaningful democratic judgments where war is concerned. They hoped that realistic simulation games would teach important principles.

Posted in Games, War | No Comments »

When the zombies take over, how long till the electricity fails?

Thursday, September 9th, 2004

This Straight Dope Staff Report answers the question, When the zombies take over, how long till the electricity fails?:

Bottom line? My guess is that within 4-6 hours there would be scattered blackouts and brownouts in numerous areas, within 12 hours much of the system would be unstable, and within 24 hours most portions of the United States and Canada, aside from a rare island of service in a rural area near a hydroelectric source, would be without power. Some installations served by wind farms and solar might continue, but they would be very small. By the end of a week, I’d be surprised if more than a few abandoned sites were still supplying power.

That’s if society collapses more-or-less instantaneously. With a little warning, the various power plants could last quite a while:

Now, let’s address a scenario where the zombification process is gradual. If the operators and utilities had sufficient advance warning they could take measures to keep the power going for a while. The first thing would be to isolate key portions of the grid, reducing the interties and connections, and then cease power delivery altogether to areas of highest zombie density. After all, it’s not like the zombies need light to read or electricity to play Everquest. Whole blocks and zones would be purposely cut off to reduce the potential drains (and to cope with downed lines from zombies climbing poles or driving trucks into transformers). Operators would work to create islands of power plants wherever possible, so if a plant were overrun by zombies and went down it wouldn’t drag others down with it. In cooperation with regional reliability coordinators, the plant operators would improve plant reliability by disabling or eliminating non-critical alarm systems that might otherwise shut down a power plant, and ignoring many safety and emissions issues.

Fuel supply would eventually be a problem. Hydro plants would fare best, essentially having an unlimited fuel supply given normal rainfall, and could operate until some essential component failed or wore out. Nuclear plants could run for perhaps a year or more before they would need refueling. Refueling is a tricky operation requiring many specialized personnel, and it’s doubtful that a nuclear plant could effectively refuel if 90% of the nuclear technicians and engineers in the country were running around glassy-eyed in the parking lot. Coal power plants on average have maybe 45-60 days’ worth of coal on hand. If the power output of the plant were reduced, this could be stretched for six months or more, but eventually it would run out unless deliveries could be maintained. There are a few mine-mouth coal power plants in the U.S. that could conceivably run for years, provided enough miners and operators remained un-zombified. Natural gas plants might be the most vulnerable, since maintaining the gas wells, balancing the gas flow, and otherwise keeping the pipeline system intact requires considerable effort. In addition, most power plants have little or no gas storage available on-site, so a zombie situation could put natural gas plants in a real bind.

So, should we all switch to solar?

As to your final question, I can suggest a better tactic than relying on solar. Go to the abandoned hardware stores, load up a flatbed trailer with gasoline generators, and take them and a few dozen tanker trucks of gasoline to your house. You could have power for a long time, possibly years or more, until the zombies finally come for you.

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Hating the Producers

Thursday, September 9th, 2004

In Hating the Producers, Arnold Kling discusses health-care spending — but first he describes the difference between right- and left-wing economists:

Right-wing economists tend to emphasize the benefits of private producers and the harms of government intervention. Left-wing economists do the opposite.

For example, recently left-wing economist Jeff Madrick argued that Wal-Mart causes harm by hiring workers at low wages. He suggested government solutions, such as raising the minimum wage and changing laws to make it easier for labor unions to organize.

For non-economists, hating producers like Wal-Mart is easy. However, it gets a lot trickier once you understand some economics. It is difficult, although not impossible, to use economic analysis to blame Wal-Mart for low wages.

My own thinking is that we should be happy with Wal-Mart, not only for lowering prices for consumers, but for finding employment for low-skilled workers. If those workers are being paid according to the value of their output, then artificially raising their wages will cause them to lose their jobs. On the other hand, if they are not being paid as much as the value of their output, then what they need are other employers willing to hire them. I would say that what they need are more Wal-Marts.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

The City That Raised Itself From the Dead

Thursday, September 9th, 2004

The City That Raised Itself From the Dead tells of the rise and fall — and literal rise — of Galveston, Texas:

For some reason, the San Francisco earthquake (1906) and the great Johnstown flood (1889) have always captured the public’s attention, but what happened at Galveston in the space of a few hours caused a death toll much higher than these two disasters combined.

Galveston in 1900 was America’s biggest cotton port and the third busiest harbor in the country. It was said to have “more millionaires, street for street” than any other U.S. city. Its famous Strand was known as the “Wall Street of the Southwest” and its harbor was called the “Western Ellis Island” because it was second only to New York as a port of entry for immigrants. It seemed destined to become one of the largest centers of commerce and industry in the western United States.

Poised as it was on the Gulf of Mexico, Galveston was also a part of the vast weather monitoring service of the recently-organized U.S. Weather Bureau. Dr. Isaac Cline was the chief local forecaster for Galveston, part of a network of 158 weather observatories across the country augmented by more than 2500 volunteer observers, and tied in by telegraph to numerous coastal stations, river monitoring stations and weather outposts in the West Indies.

When some of the city fathers had suggested that perhaps a barrier wall should be built along the coastal side of the island as a protection against hurricanes, Dr. Cline opposed the project as a waste of money. He characterized fears that a hurricane could endanger the city as “an absurd delusion.” The idea had been abandoned. Dr. Cline, after all, was a highly trained weather expert.

Then an “x-storm,” an extreme hurricane hit:

Dr. Cline raised the black and red hurricane flag at the Galveston weather station on Friday, September 7, but few people paid attention. Angry winds, precursors of the storm, blew late Friday and early Saturday. Galveston, an island about 30 miles long and two miles wide, was virtually at sea level. Flooding from the Gulf began early. By noon on Saturday southern and eastern parts of the city were under water. When night fell on September 8th winds were blowing at 80 miles per hour, hurling roof shingles and other debris through the streets.

By this time all four bridges leading off the island had been destroyed. The 37,000 residents of Galveston had no choice but to ride out the storm. One of the last communiqu?s from the city, read, “Gulf rising rapidly, half the city now under water?great loss of life must result.”

Sometime before midnight the wind gauge at Dr. Cline’s weather station recorded 100 miles per hour and then was blown away. The barometer dropped to 28.55, the lowest ever recorded at that time.

As the winds howled out of the darkness, the storm surge came. The highest point of ground on Galveston Island was 8.7 feet above sea level. The wall of water that roared out of the Gulf was 16 feet high. People on the roofs of taller buildings could hear the crashing sounds as houses and buildings around them were carried away.

By the early hours of September 9th the storm had passed. More than 2000 people had perished at Johnstown. About 700 would die six years later in San Francisco. The best estimates for Galveston range from a minimum of 6,000 to a maximum of 12,000, counting those lost in areas beyond the city. Among the dead, Dr. Cline’s wife.

More than 3,600 buildings and houses had been destroyed. Damage estimates in today’s dollars would be $700 million. Rotting bodies littered the streets and beaches creating a terrible stench in the summer heat. Attempts to load bodies onto barges, weight them down and bury them at sea went awry. Many of the corpses washed back to shore the following day. Cremation was the only practical solution. Mass funeral pyres glowed amid the devastation for more than a week.

It took some time for news of what had happened in Galveston to get out to the nation. When relief trains attempted to reach the city the engineers found the rails blocked by debris and piles of corpses.

Then Galveston literally rose again:

Three civil engineers, Alfred Noble, Henry M. Robert and H.C. Ripley, supervised the amazing work. Quarter-mile-square sections of the city were enclosed with dikes. All structures within these sections were jacked up. Even the gas, water and sewer lines were raised. Then sand from the Galveston ship channel was pumped into each section through huge pipe lines until it was filled to the new level.

It took 16 million cubic yards of sand (imagine one million dump trucks) to raise 500 city blocks, some just a few inches, others almost a foot, above sea level.

Posted in Urbanism | No Comments »

Another Kind of Blowback

Thursday, September 9th, 2004

Another Kind of Blowback opens with a chillingly familiar scene:

Terrorists choose as their soft target a school containing dozens of children. After demonstrating that they mean business by killing a security guard and murdering several students, they proceed to hold the rest of the school hostage. In the midst of negotiations, a rescue mission manages to kill all of the terrorists, but only after the hostage takers shoot dead many of their young captives.

The year is 1974 and the place is Maalot in northern Israel. If this historic event has a grisly resonance after last week’s massacre in Beslan Russia, it also provides a lesson on the potential for political and moral ‘blowback’ in today’s Age of Terror.

The term “blowback” is typically reserved for the unintended consequences of American covert activity — e.g., arming the Afghans to fight the Soviets — but that’s not the only kind of blowback out there:

Nineteen seventy four, the year in which 21 students were butchered by their Palestinian captors, was also the year in which Yassir Arafat was brought to the United Nations as the first non head of state to formally address the General Assembly. Indeed, as the 1973 Yom Kippur War and subsequent Arab oil embargo enriched the Middle East, that power was used to put the PLO at center stage of world affairs. Ironically, 1974 was also the year that the Soviet Union forged close ties with Arafat, inaugurating a Moscow office for the PLO that remains open today just a few hundred miles from the site of Russia’s recent Maalot.

While participation in a schoolyard massacre should have put a political movement beyond the pale of human affairs, Maalot and the subsequent aggrandizement of the PLO demonstrates that the world was ready to reward handsomely, rather than punish, such behavior. It was a lesson well learned in the Middle East and elsewhere where political power and influence was the reward to those who demonstrated the greatest level of depravity.

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Flying with Libertarian Hawks

Thursday, September 9th, 2004

Flying with Libertarian Hawks addresses the war in Iraq, giving arguments both pro and con:

And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.
— Thomas Hobbes

The libertarian hawk takes her cues from Hobbes, not Locke, as the spaces mostly untouched by globalization are, in her view, like a state-of-nature. She sees threats that organize themselves in the shadows beyond civilization; operating, no less, in an age of deadly weapons proliferation. She fears the world’s great, but nimble powers coalescing into a slothful and ineffectual global body — where the toughest decisions of life and limb must be made in committee. She understands that freedom does not drop like manna from heaven, but is earned drop-for-drop and coin-for-coin by the sacrifices of blood and treasure.

Con:

Which brings me to what could be the best criticism against the current conflict in Iraq. Let’s call it the Hayekian Argument. It can be summarized in the following way: a complex order, like a country, is very difficult to plan or impose upon a people. It emerges, pace Hayek, “spontaneously.” Under certain institutional conditions backed by years of tradition and certain entrenched cultural mores, civil societies can form. But these conditions simply are not in place in Iraq, so we may have gotten ourselves into a? (OK, here goes) ? a quagmire.

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Forcing Freedom: Can liberalism be spread at gunpoint?

Thursday, September 9th, 2004

In Forcing Freedom: Can liberalism be spread at gunpoint?, Ronald Bailey lays out a “properly libertarian foreign policy,” keeping a few points in mind:

First, the spread of liberal, free market democracy in the 20th century has been accomplished largely by force of arms — largely, in fact, by force of American arms. Would the same fat, happy, complacent Europe that opposed U.S. intervention in Iraq now exist had not the United States helped to liberate that continent in World War II?

Germany and Japan are free societies today because free institutions were imposed on them by the victorious Allies. Additionally, would the Iron Curtain have lifted from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics without a 50-year policy of containment and, later, a strategy of confrontation known as the Reagan Doctrine? Reagan?s active support of insurgent movements in Central America, Africa, and Central Asia was aimed at overthrowing Soviet client states and sapping Soviet resources. The policy worked, even as it created regrettable side effects, such as rogue rebels in Angola and a cadre of rootless mujahedin in Afghanistan. But it worked — the Soviet empire is no more.

Second, a world that is half free is dangerous to liberty at home and abroad. In a half-free world, free societies must protect themselves from the ambitions of tyrants motivated by ideology (Hitler and Stalin) or greed (Saddam Hussein). In the face of tyrants and terrorists of the Al Qaeda variety, politicians in free societies persuade anxious voters that we need tighter borders, increased spying on visitors and citizens, and detentions based on the slimmest of national security pretexts.

The result is a growing national security apparatus, including a bigger military, a new Department of Homeland Security, and expanded domestic and international spy agencies. All of these diminish domestic liberty and soak up more and more of our citizens? wealth. These expanded state powers have even tempted some conservatives to agitate for the establishment of an American empire. In the past our government justified supporting unsavory regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Zaire as necessary allies in our nation?s struggle against even more menacing tyrants and terrorist organizations. Not surprisingly, to people yearning to be free of their tyrants, our support of their oppressors looked like hypocrisy and thus often encouraged them to adopt anti-liberal ideologies as guides for their struggles against oppression.

Third, libertarians certainly believe in self-defense. Most Americans support going after Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda for the 9/11 atrocities. But what about pre-emption, the most controversial element of George W. Bush?s foreign policy? A person doesn?t have to wait until someone hits her or shoots her before she can defend herself. Similarly, free societies certainly have the right to defend themselves against imminent attack.

Then the other libertarians jump all over his case.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

New Cellphone Headset Cuts Background Noise, Improves Voice Clarity

Thursday, September 9th, 2004

Interesting tech. From New Cellphone Headset Cuts Background Noise, Improves Voice Clarity:

Aliph’s Jawbone technology, which grew out of research the company did for the Pentagon, relies on two kinds of microphones. Standard microphones transmit your speech and detect background noise. A special contact microphone, which rests against your cheek, uses vibrations in your bones to determine exactly when you are speaking.

This latter mike, which Aliph calls a ‘voice activity sensor,’ allows the Jawbone headset to distinguish your voice from background noises much more accurately than a normal cellphone headset can.

Like many other acoustic systems, the Jawbone includes special chips and software that attempt to enhance voice frequencies and reduce background frequencies. But because the contact microphone lets the device know precisely when you are speaking, it is able to apply these digital filters more efficiently and successfully.

To accommodate the multiple mikes, the Jawbone’s design is quite different from most headsets, which aim to be almost invisible. The Jawbone is light but large and quite visible, with a shiny aluminum piece that extends from your ear to your cheek. On one end of this prong is an earpiece, and on the other end is the contact mike that rests against your face. There’s also a second part, a control unit that clips to a shirt or belt, or can tuck into a pocket or purse.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

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