Hilarious video on Google: Panda Sneezes

Sneezing panda, priceless!

10 Most Outrageous Civil Rights Abuses of 2006

Slate magazine assembled the "Bill of Wrongs": the 10 worst civil rights abuses of the past year. Well worth a read. Some of these are a stretch to round out the list, but my favorite is #6, the state secrets doctrine, under which the Bush administration gets away with just about anything...

Colbert at the White House Correspondents dinner

YouTube removed my previous video links, but here's one that persisted on Google Video:

Google video

It's a hilarious speech be Stephen Colbert ridiculing Bush's flaws. You have to watch it to see Bush squirm under the ridicule.

The Distributed Capital

Washington DC and many other world capitals were built in the days before the telegraph, much less phones, radio, and the Internet. Back then, all the important functions of the government like the White House, Congress, Supreme Court, etc, had to be close together to be able to communicate at all without waiting for the Pony Express to shuttle letters.

This of course leads to problems: having all the important centers of government in one place leaves it very vulnerable to attack, especially now when a single nuke could take out all the seats of power and seriously cripple the nation.

So here's my idea: create a distributed capital throughout the country, with secure telecom links for communication. Keep the White House in Washington DC, move Congress to LA, Supreme Court to Dallas, etc. The FBI can go to Chicago, CIA to Seattle, and so on. Everyone will still be able to communicate in real-time via teleconferencing links, but there's no single point of failure, and no big target for terrorists or other enemies.

There are a few problems, from having to build new offices all over the country, to different time zones complicating matters a little bit. But in a global economy, time zones mean very little--crises arise at all hours anyhow. We could keep all the monuments and buildings such as the Capitol still in DC -- as a tourist destination and symbol of power -- but move the actual important functions of government all over the country.

That way, there's no obvious target for terrorists: they might get their hands on a nuclear weapon and take out Washington, for example, but Congress and the CIA would still be fully working the same day! They could take out the Pentagon in St. Louis, but so what: the White House would still function.

As an added side benefit, the politicians might be a little more mindful of their obligations to the public, since they wouldn't all be able to hide out in Washington, insulated from real people.

And, it would stimulate the economy in the short run, since a lot of new buildings would have to go up, lots of offices moving across the country, etc. And it would help in the long run as well, with the bi-annual change of government bringing in fresh people and money to all corners of the country.

Excellent recommendations for the 2006 California Ballot Propositions

Here's an excellent website by Pete Stahl with thorough reviews and recommendations for the confusing 2006 California ballot initiatives. His explanations are clear, and arguments persuasive. Even if I don't agree with everything he says, his reasoning is very helpful in making up your own mind. If you're confused by the propositions, give this site a try.

Time for some investigatin'

Here's a great reason to elect a Democratic House and/or Senate: some exciting federal investigations have been much overdue lately. This is by far not a complete list, but here's a good start on all the issues that the Republicans have been getting a free ride on:

• Iraq: who lied about the WMD pretext for war? Who's to blame for the atrocious post-war non-policy? How are we ever going to get out?
  
  
• What's the connection between Dick Cheney and Enron? Was he involved in the scandal? Did he have knowledge of it beforehand? What role did he play in the Valerie Plame scandal?
  
  
• The Foley scandal: What did Hastert and the rest of the Republics know, and when did they know it?
  
  
• Was the 2004 election stolen? If so, by whom? -- see this previous article in this space.
  
  
• The Abramoff corruption scandal -- exactly who took money from this scoundrel, when, and how much, and what did they give his customers in return?
  
  

Remember all the hot air and energy wasted on the Clinton-era phoney scandals such as "Travelgate" by the Republican congress who couldn't stand the fact that a Democrat was in power? Not to mention the impeachment for consenting sex between adults. I think it's high time Republicans got a taste of the power of Congressional investigations.

Was the 2004 Election Stolen???

You read that right: not 2000, but was the 2004 election stolen?! That's the question asked in a Rolling Stone article written by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

"...what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13)"

But as the article details, the problems weren't limited to Ohio alone -- many more states that ultimately went to Bush had the same kind of problems. This kind of cheating would be compounded by the use of virtually non-traceable, non-recountable electronic voting machines, as I wrote about in this space earlier. But there's more:

"... one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn’t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House."

Bush knew about impending bin Laden attack 2 months before 9/11!

According to this Washington Post article by Bob Woodward, Condi Rice was warned by CIA director Tenet 2 months before 9/11 happened, but failed to do anything about it! From the article, the CIA director:

...did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one."

But instead of acting on this information, the Bush administration was trying to push the anti-ballistic missile defense, and planning a strategy for going into Iraq. And now, Rice has the gall to say to people who accuse her and Bush of dragging their feet on Al Qaeda before 9/11 that "what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years."

Voting Machine Fraud with Frightening Ease

The Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy has issued a damning report of the virtual lack of security and auditability in Diebold Systems voting machines. The group of technologists and computer programmers write that

...an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus.

The site BlackBoxVoting.org has published an entire book about the ridiculous vulnerabilities of Diebold voting machines, which lack even the most basic protections of ATM machines made by the same company! In this post, they even show you how easy it is to remove the memory card used for storing ballots and alter it in an almost untraceable way!

I'm waiting for the American people to wake up and realize that the groundwork is being laid for wholesale tampering with, or even stealing of elections in the USA! All it will take is a few corrupt voting officials in key counties or states, or even a virus released by hackers, political zealots, or worse!

Computer nerds have a special role to play in this: we need to warn the general public about the limits of technology, and against blind faith in computerized voting. I'm not opposed to automated ballot counting, but it MUST be accompanied by strict security and complete auditability, or else the new voting systems will not be an improvement, but rather a large setback to the cause of democracy.

2006 Election Polling Data

Here is a great web site for keeping track of current polling data on the upcoming midterm 2006 Congressional elections: http://www.electoral-vote.com:2006/

They present the information as a map, with states in the red or blue category, as well as a prediction for the makeup of the Senate and House if the race were held today. They also keep track of the polling trends in the states over time. Fascinating!

Why are these "idiots" running our country?

The title is not just an idle use of the word "idiot"--for a fascinating read on the origins of the word, check out this wikipedia article.

From the article:

"Idiot" was originally used in ancient Greek city-states to refer to people who were overly concerned with their own self-interest and ignored the needs of the community. Declining to take part in public life, such as (semi-)democratic government of the polis (city state), such as the Athenian democracy, was considered dishonorable. "Idiots" were seen as having bad judgment in public and political matters.

SuperSize my Gas Guzzler!

McDonald's has been giving away toy Hummers with kid meals - Theo even got one when we went to McD's before getting on an airplane. Well, someone took notice of this, and created this satirical website about it -- ronaldmchummer.com

The funny thing is, the Hummers were billed as "Hydrogen" vehicles -- wishful thinking!

Milwaukee Voted "America's Drunkest City!"

Check out this link from Lycos News. I wonder if it's because of all the beer people consume there?

Republicans Pushing for War with Iran!?!?

This New York Times story quotes numerous Republicans in Congress and associated with the White House as saying that we need to start another war in the Middle East, this time with Iran! Haven't they learned anything from Iraq? Or the recent Israel-Hezbollah war? It boggles the mind that they're willing to ignore all evidence, including the CIA's, to throw the country into another war! These people must be stopped at the polls this Fall, and thorough investigations on the run-up of the Iraq war must be initiated to expose the dangerous demagoguery of the Bush White House and Republican congress!

Excellent read: The One Percent Doctrine, by Ron Suskind

This fascinating book (link to Amazon) is an inside look into the clandestine world of the CIA and FBI after 9/11. It's a scorching indictment of the way the Bush administration, including W himself, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Powell, mishandled the actual war on terror to further their own goal of invading Iraq. Informative and sometimes frightening, it reads like a spy novel. Read the reviews on Amazon for an excellent summary of the book.

Proxy war in the Middle East: The Cold War revisited?

The current war between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon reminds me of nothing so much as the so-called "Proxy Wars" waged during the Cold War between client states of the US and the USSR. Israel is practically the 51st US state, and Hezbollah is really a proxy for Iran, which, as this article from Mother Jones explains, is really a proxy for Russia and China.

In other words, the US is in a global struggle with China and Russia for control of oil resources in the Middle East, which is playing itself out in skirmishes along the Lebanese border. In a few years, if the rivalry between the US and China/Russia heats up in the next decade, the current conflict may be seen as the first of the new crop of proxy wars.

Why now? As some have reported, it might be a way for Iran to thumb its nose at Washington, just at the US and Europe were preparing to tighten their demands that Iran stop producing nuclear fuel. In a way, Iran might be showing the West just how much power it has in the region to wreak havoc with the Middle East, which is something that the Bush administration in particular does not want right now, given how badly Iraq is going.

This might have a positive side: as during the Cold War, proxy wars have a way of releasing some tension without having to go to an all-out war, which would be disastrous. They're like little earthquakes releasing tension along a fault. But of course, the threat of a small fanatical group in the Middle East getting their hands on nukes throws a wild card into the equation. That was never an issue during the Cold War.

Nikon D200 Digital SLR from a D100 user's perspective

I've recently had a chance to use the Nikon D200, the latest-generation digital SLR (single-lens reflex) camera from Nikon. As the title suggests, I've been a long-time user of the Nikon D100, the predecessor of the D200. Both cameras are aimed at the pro and "serious amateur" photographer, although they are very different beasts.

I've used the D100 since 2003, and have created almost 10,000 exposures (latest sequential frame number as of this writing is 9,688). In the process, I've learned a lot about this camera and have come to love it and respect it. In fact, if I hadn't gotten my hands on a D200 recently, I would have thought that the D100 was close to the perfect camera. Some of my favorite pictures were taken with it, and the combination of RAW format images and Nikon Capture application for editing the RAW files was almost unbeatable for producing great images.

However, as I mentioned above, I recently got to play with the D200 (while attending a friend's wedding, which I ended up shooting pretty much myself since they didn't get a real photographer), and I fell in love with the camera almost immediately.

Advantages of the D200

Controls First off, the controls on the D200 are much more logical. One thing that always bothered me about the D100 is that common tasks, like switching program modes, or switching the ISO value, were cumbersome. You had to rotate the top left dial to the setting you wanted to change, then rotate the right dials to get it set, and then rotate the top left dial back to Program shoting mode. On the D200, the rotating dial on the left became 3 pushbuttons: Qual (for picture size or quality), ISO, and WB (for white balance). To change either, just press one of the pushbuttons, then use the thumb dials on the left to set. For example, changing the ISO equivalent on the fly is as easy as pressing the ISO button, while simultaneously rotating one of the dials on the right to the right value. Much simpler than before!

The screen: Definite improvement in resolution, brightness, and viewing angle compared to the D100. I cringe now whenever I use the D100 at how bad that tiny screen is in comparison.

Flash: exposures are now much more accurate, thanks to the pre-flash that's fired just before the exposure is taken, which is used to fine-tune the flash duration. Also, Nikon went to wireless off-camera flash with the new SB-800 flash, which I haven't played with very much, but which promises to be very handy.

Color balance: the default color balance setting is much more accurate than on the D100. You could achieve the same result by manually tweaking the D100's color balance settings, and manipulating the RAW/NEF images, but that took more time.

Auto ISO function: for some reason, this never worked well for me on the D100. The idea is that if the shutter speed falls below a certain level, the ISO would be adjusted up automatically to keep the shutter speed high enough for hand-holding. You might get grainier, but still sharp hand-held images. On the D200, it works like a charm, and you can control the shutter speed threshold, which is very nice.

Customizability: The D100 has a lot of options to customize, but the D200 surpasses it by a lot. For example, there's a button on the front lower right of the camera (it falls right under your right pinky when holding the camera normally) that can be assigned multiple functions, from auto exposure lock, to focus lock (as in the old 8008), to flash value lock (it does a preflash on command then stores the value), to turning off flash altogether for that exposure. There are tons of other customizations as well. As a gadget head, I like that :-)

Where the cameras are about the same

Exposure: Nikon's matrix metering is right on most of the time. On the D100 it tends to underexpose by 1/3 - 1/2 stop, but that's OK for digital--it's a lot harder to recover detail from overexposed areas than those that are underexposed.

Shutter lag: there's no perceptible difference between the two. The preflash that the D200 sends out before a flash exposure doesn't add any noticeable lag IMHO.

Drawbacks of the D200

There aren't very many:

Batteries: One area where the D100 still wins is battery life. The D200 sucks batteries like crazy! It's only good for about 300 exposures in my experience, less with on-board flash usage. You can see the battery level going down as you're taking pictures. On the other hand, the D200 has a bigger CCD (10MP) which sucks much more power, and has a much bigger, much brigher, and more viewable LCD display which also I'm sure hurts power usage, but with the tradeoff of being much more useful for assessing exposure and focus. I'll just have to get a second battery or perhaps a battery pack for the D200 and suck it up :-)

Also, the flash fires a preflash before every exposure, thus draining batteries even more, especially if you use the built-in flash a lot.

Hummingbird

Hummingbird,
originally uploaded by grogo.

The hummingbirds are back on our deck again! Here's a cool photo of a hummer coming in for a landing on our feeder. The kids love to watch them.

iRobot Roomba robotic vacuum review

We recently bought the Roomba robotic vacuum from iRobot, a company started by Rodney Brooks from the MIT Robot labs. I have to admit that it was an impulse purchase from woot.com. If you have problems with impulse buying, stay away from this site!!!

The idea behind the Roomba is that you have an autonomous machine which periodically vacuums your house, with a minimum of intervention on your part. Sounds simple, but reality is still very far from even this simple goal. The real reason to get one is that it's an adult (read: for grownup men) toy which is disguised as a household item! You're really getting a cool remote-controlled, semi-autonomous toy, which you can pass off to your partner as a "vacuum"! :-) Genius!

I've compiled some "Rules of Robot Vacuums" that I think would make the Roomba and similar machines most useful (with apologies to Isaac Asimov!):

1. A robot vacuum must act independently. The whole idea is that I no longer have to think about vacuuming at all, but it doesn't work that way. For starters, the standard Roomba package that I got doesn't include a scheduler which would automatically start the vacuum at preset intervals. It's available as an add-on, but for more dough, of course. You have to manually tell the robot to start vacuuming. In truth, this is not a big deal, since it comes with an infrared remote with a button to start cleaning.
   
   
2. The robot should be able to get around the house on its own. Here too the Roomba falls somewhat short. It does scoot around and navigate some obstacles, and even avoid stairs, but it's not perfect. For example, I had to get rid of all the throw rugs we had in the house for it to work, since the frills on the carpets get sucked in, and stall the vacuum. In truth, this is a problem for regular vacs as well, but a human can at least avoid the trouble spots. Secondly, it tends to get jammed underneath some furniture, like bookshelves and beds, with low clearance. It often manages to wiggle out, but not always. We also have a play-mat on top of carpet in the kids' playroom, which causes perennial problems. Once it gets off the mat, it can't climb back on. As a result, we have to block off all areas where it could climb off. The package came with an infrared "virtual wall" which allows you to block off a straight line, and it's useful, but still not perfect.
   
   In practice, even after I rearranged the house, removed throw rugs, blocked off obvious pitfalls, set up a virtual wall to keep it out of trouble, it still gets stuck about 1/2 the time before completing a run. That's not a huge deal, because it'll usually manage to clean up somewhat before it gets stuck.
   
   
3. The vacuum robot should vacuum well. Here again, there are some problems. It's just not a very powerful vacuum! Of course, since it's battery-powered, it can't rival a plug-in vacuum for power. But the roomba does a pretty good job here, for two reasons. One, it has a lot more patience than I do when vacuuming. It can take 1-2 hours per room, or at least until the battery runs out, which is a lot longer than I'd ever spend. Therefore, even though its extraction efficiency is less per sweep, it can make many sweeps of the same area, making it fairly equivalent. Also, the Roomba has a complex array of brushes and filters which does a pretty good job on hard flooring surfaces and low-pile carpet. I haven't tried it on very plush carpet yet.
   
   Another issue is coverage. The Roomba moves somewhat randomly around a room -- it richochets off walls and furniture with sometimes random movements. It actually does follow the walls and borders pretty well, which is a good idea since most dust and dirt accumulates around the margins. But the vast empty space in between is hard for it to cover. I haven't tried it systematically, but I think the coverage is less than 100% per run.
   
   Here's a point in favor of the Roomba: it's pretty short and tetherless, so it's able to get into areas that are otherwise hard to clean, such as under some couches and beds. There are some areas under our bed that haven't seen a vacuum for years until we got a Roomba! That's a definite advantage.
   
   
4. It should be unobtrusive. Here the Roomba is pretty good. It's much quieter than a regular plug-in vacuum, so it's possible that it could run at night while its owner is sleeping. However, it would have to run in a different room--if it came into my bedroom at night it would definitely wake me up.
   
   
5. The robot should take care of its own energy needs. Ideally, it would generate energy off the stuff it vacuums up! :-) Here, iRobot did a pretty good job. My model came with a charging base, which the Roomba can theoretically dock with automatically. It does work most of the time, but sometimes, the Roomba gets hopelessly confused and gives up. The design goal was to have the Roomba dock automatically at the end of the cleaning cycle to recharge and get ready for the next session. Again, it's somewhat spotty.
   

What's my overall impression? I'm still glad I bought it, even given all the caveats above. The bottom line is that our house, with 2 kids under 4 and one dog, plus two sloppy adults, is noticeably cleaner than it used to be, with minimal effort on my part. I do spend some time arranging the house to make it safe for the vacuum, but it's less than I would if I had to do the vacuuming--get out the vacuum, put in a new bag, find an outlet, plug it in, vacuum, move to a different plug in another room, vacuum, unplug, put away, etc. The cleaning is not perfect, but definitely better than what we used to do before--which is just let the dirt sit around for a while!

Plus, it's actually fun to watch the Roomba make its way aroudn the room, watch how it navigates obstacles. My kids actually enjoy staring at it for a while. They never had that kind of reaction with a regular vacuum.

Another unexpected bonus is that my dog, who's normally very scared of upright vacuums, is completely unphased by this one, even if it bumps into her.