Death in Iraq

The 20th Century saw unprecedented violence, crimes of war, and deliberate genocide on a scale never before seen. Thanks to George Bush and all those who supported his invasion of Iraq, it seems the 21st Century is starting out in the same tradition. Last year the Lancet published this article from researchers at the John's Hopkins School of Public Health with the following findings:

...data from 1849 households that contained 12 801 individuals in 47 clusters was gathered. 1474 births and 629 deaths were reported during the observation period. Pre-invasion mortality rates were 5·5 per 1000 people per year (95% CI 4·3–7·1), compared with 13·3 per 1000 people per year (10·9–16·1) in the 40 months post-invasion. We estimate that as of July, 2006, there have been 654 965 (392 979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2·5% of the population in the study area. Of post-invasion deaths, 601 027 (426 369–793 663) were due to violence, the most common cause being gunfire.

Forgetting that many American soldiers jingoistically volunteered to fight in Iraq, American propaganda outlets regularly report on the number of US soldiers that have been killed in the invasion of Iraq while rarely reporting on cumulative death tolls among Iraqi civilians. Meanwhile, the United States accepts less than 100 (figure awaiting confirmation) Iraqi or Afghan refugees every year. The mass genocide and crimes against humanity that have been caused directly or indirectly by the US Government with popular support need to be acknowledged, taught, and remembered alongside the numerous atrocities of the previous century. The politicians complicit in an immoral, illegal, and unjustified invasion including Senators and members of Congress should be tried before an International War Crimes body. The removal of a single tyrranical ruler and his imaginary war machine could have occurred with a single bullet or missile. The neoconservative experiment to impose a peaceful democratic system of government on an unwilling people by force and at great expense in money and lives has failed utterly as any informed and thinking person could have predicted. Never again.

Urban Liveability

Economist Intelligence Unit has ranked world cities by liveability. Unsurprisingly, Canadian, Australian, and Swiss cities rank highest.

Suprnova

The legendary torrent site Suprnova, down for several years, has been resurrected with the help of the PirateBay. Warning: Users of such public torrent sites in areas vulnerable to copyright enforcement tend to be more exposed to monitoring and legal threat. Private sites like Demonoid, BitMe, BitMeTV, and UKNova tend to be safer because of their requirements for upload ratios and their exclusivity.

More Screens

Most people still use one monitor 17-19 inches for their computing display needs. Quality large screen monitors with good resolution such as the Apple 2560x1600 Cinema display still run an unreasonable 1800 USD. A good solution to increase productivity and ease of use is to add 200 USD 19 inch flat monitors to your display. Going from 1 to 2 monitors yields a vast improvement. My workstation consists of a 8 x 19 inch monitor grid powered by 2 x NVIDIA Quadro NVS graphics cards physically supported by 2 x Ergotron DS 100 Quad monitor desk stands for a combined 10.4 million pixel display for around 2700 USD, or 3800 px/USD. Considering the Cinema displays run at 2275 px/USD, my setup, though somewhat excessive, provides good bang per buck.

When using several monitors in Windows, the programme Utramon (torrents) is an indispensable addition. It extends the task bar to every monitor and adds several other simple but effective multiple monitor utilities.

Cosmic Variance

Cosmic Variance is a highly regarded web log for those with a particular interest in Astronomy and Physics but do not necessarily hold graduate degrees. It is authored by seven different contributors, experts in their field.

Blog Recommendation: Charles Kenny

Charles Kenny has a blog about Development and Welfare Economics.

Scitalks

Scitalks is a Web video site which links to interesting scientifically relevant material.

(Unfortunately much of the content is in RealPlayer or streaming Windows Media format)

Virgin America Inaugural Flight

For too long, American air travel has been dominated by behemoth, union-dominated, subsidised monsters which offer generally poor service all around including flight attendance. Even State airlines from socialist countries are consistently better. Virgin America gives great hope to the future of domestic airline travel in the United States in terms of both quality and competition. The San Francisco based airline has taken its inaugural flight as documented by Engaget.

gPhone

Rumours abound regarding the development of a Google Phone. Certainly it makes a great deal of sense in light of their continued development of applications for mobile devices as well as their recent bid commitment for 700 MHz spectrum with the caveat of open access for mobile devices. A new rumour suggests the Google phone could be built upon the Open Source Linux openMoko phone currently under development and due to be released this fall. The openMoko has all the potential in itself to be a dominant device or at least force other commercial phones (ie iPhone) to open themselves up more (VoIP, etc). Creating an open source, add-driven phone would probably be the wisest business decision for Google and surely would highlight everything that is good about the company.

Heroin

From The Insider - Heroin on the NHS (torrent):

15 years ago the Swiss had one of the highest rates of drug addiction and AIDS in Europe. They decided to radically change their drug laws. To combat the spread of the disease 6000 clean needles were dispensed every day in the Zurich park. In this safe zone, addicts could shoot up openly. Shocked by the thousands of addicts who came forward, the government swiftly took control of the illegal market. They stopped criminalising heroin and made it a medical issue instead. Clinics were set up where addicts, now patients, were given as much heroin as they needed. The results have been astonishing. Drug crime and deaths have gone down dramatically, and addiction has gone down by 90%. Prescribing heroin has almost eradicated the Swiss drug problem. Addicts can now lead normal lives and because heroin is no longer seen as cool and rebellious, far fewer young people are drawn to it in the first place.

Criminalising drug use is a formula for social disaster be it alcohol or even heroin. Drug regulation through taxation, registration, or controlled usage may be beneficial to a society, but the focus of any law should be in maximising the welfare of everyone affected. At the end of the day, what a person does with their own body is their business so long as others are not negatively impacted.

Heroin by the Velvet Underground.

Missile Defence

Under the Bush administration, in 2002 the United States withdrew from the anti-Ballistic Missle Treaty and began to pursue an ABM system. According to a Congressional Budget Report, the total estimated expense of the system by 2024 could be as high as 247 billion USD. In the Cold War, an ABM system would have been quite an advantage given the Nuclear Missile Technology of the 20th Century. I put forward the idea that if a legitimately recognised Nation State possessing nuclear weapons did wish to deliver them to a target, 21st Century technology including unmanned subs and UAVs will make the delivery of such devices far easier to deliver than launching a Ballistic Missile. Even using 3000 year old technology such as shipping the nuclear device covertly in a standard shipping container would have a high probability of success. Subverting an advanced technology is always much cheaper than the technology's development.

A regular criticism of the US military is that they are constantly fighting the previous war rather than looking ahead. The money spent on Missile Defence will be completely wasted. The United States in developing this technology continues to alienate its allies, a cost which is high but difficult to quantify. Imagine if instead the $247 billion were either never spent at all or rather spent on basic scientific research grants or technological competition such as the DARPA Challenge.

Wii

Yesterday I played Wii for the first time. The game was Mario Strikers Charged, which should be called Mario Football. A motion sensitive vibrating pointing wand adds a completely new dimension to human-machine interaction. It reminds me of the leap from keyboard to mouse. In itself, it is just a toy, but one which demonstrates the advanced creativity and ingenuity of the Japanese and foreshadows future technology interfaces.

Mormons

PBS recently produced a 4 hour documenatary series about the Mormons (torrents). An accurate and fairly respectful work, it does gloss over some of the stranger sides of Mormon theology. Mormonism is in many respects an American Muslim styled religion although this parallel is completely ignored by the documentary and probably most Mormons themselves. South Park had a very good episode "All About the Mormons" from Season 7. Given that Mormons now even have a US Presidential candidate, they are worth understanding.

Atom

The new BBC 4 documentary, Atom, hosted by Jim Al-Khalili, is one of the best documentary series I have seen this year. It focuses on the development of the modern theory of the atom and quantum physics. Available on the usual torrent networks.

NASA

Thanks to one of Bush's brilliant ideas, NASA's budget is now mostly wasted in M2M (the human Mission to Mars) and the rest on the shuttle and ISS. A recent NPR interview put the orginisation further in question. Michael Griffin, director of NASA, doubted whether we would not all be better off under global warming and therefore should not prioritise its abatement.

With regards to the manned Space programme, NASA has recently experienced an astronaut bizarre love triangle and now allegations of drunken flight and systems sabotage. If NASA is to exist, which I believe it no longer should, its beneficial role should be to fund Earth Science, Astronomy, Aerospace Engineering, and general technology research in the public interest.

The Mars Rover and the Galileo and Cassini missions are examples of the incredible benefits that can come from a serious scientifically driven Space agency. The scientific value for those programmes has vastly exceeded the costs because they had the right idea: robotic exploration of outer space. Humans were not designed to live in space and so far the cost of such adventures is no were close to the benefits. Let human space exploration take place commercially as Richard Branson and Burt Rutan are demonstrating. Let scientists do their jobs correctly, and stop distorting their mission and their budgets with a child's fantasy. If children want to go into space, let them finance it themselves.

Linux, Peu à Peu

I mentioned before that given my disgust with M$ Vista, all future PCs I run would be Linux with a virtualised Windows Server 2003 Enterprise session. Despite my flirtations with Linux, Windows frankly works for every application I need personally or professionally and I cannot use Linux just as I cannot use OS X perpetually without a Parallels Windows session running inside. Do not get me wrong; I want to see Open Source Linux come to dominate computer operating systems, but in the short run it can only attract users by doing absolutely everything a normal Windows PC can do with the same level of convenience and full compatibility. Even some of the most enthusiastic Linux geeks I know have found themselves getting sucked back into Windows.

I have recommended Parallels especially for Mac users given the coherence feature. VMWare has some other advantages like hosting and remote connection as well as mountable bootable partitions rather than strictly virtual hard drives. VMWare Server is now free!

Finally, I have made this change for my personal PC which is set to Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn 32 bit natively with VMWare running WinXP32. Using this guide it was fairly straightforward as far as Linux installs go. Unfortunately for enterprise level 64 bit computing, the free VMWare Server does not yet cut the mustard. You need the multi-k$ version for that apparently. Peu à peu, we will be always running Linux. I am now doing it, and so can you.

Robert Hanson on Intellectual Property

Robert Hanson, GWT developer and author of the well regarded guide GWT in Action, has a great new post on his blog. He shares the practical viewpoint with the rest of the rational and uncorrupted world that piracy is generally a good and inevitable phenomenon and that Open Source is generally the best model to develop software not just in the aggregate, but also for specific customers. He rightly chastises those who follow the closed-source model of development. Furthermore this post explains the usefulness to Java developers of the JAD Eclipse plugin. Since Hanson praises piracy, it is worth noting that his book is available on several torrent networks.

Ron Paul

Ron Paul, a staunch libertarian, recently interviewed at Google as part of his campaign for the Presidency of the US - a must see. Many of his espoused positions such as supporting the gold and silver standards for public currency seem impractical or irrelevant, yet they are based upon sound legal foundation, ie the US Constitution. He is a candidate who is easy to distort, yet his solid character, sound principles, and political idealism are undeniable.

It is clear that the letter of the law set out by the Constitution has gradually been eroded and perverted by activist judicial decisions, misguided lawmakers, and tyrannical Presidents. Rather than a politically isolationist Republic of free citizens, the United States has become a fascist empire, able to invade, occupy, or completely eliminate other nations in blitzkrieg at the whim of a single individual. While most other current presidential candidates have supported these illegal and immoral policies, or at least in principle would use such illegal power under certain circumstances, Ron Paul is one of the few who has always in principle and practice been opposed (eg the Conquest of Iraq).

Through the "War on Drugs," a war against its own populace, their property, and freedom itself, the United States Government manifestly defecates upon the Enlightenment principles upon which it was founded and the cannabis paper upon which it was written. Any convoluted judicial argument for the legality of such policies should have long ago resulted in the prompt impeachment of any supporting justices and the arrest of any enforcing agents. By continuing to prosecute this crime against humanity, the US Government has undermined its own legitimacy.

As directed in the Constitution, Ron Paul supports States' rights in legislating or enforcing powers not guaranteed to the federal government in the Constitution.

On the Colbert Report where I was exposed to Paul, he supported the elimination of almost every federal agency and administration including United Nations agencies. In the interview, he comes off as somewhat of an extremist, yet in fact he is perhaps one of the few sane, thinking, and principled. I have little doubt that if given a proper chance, most of the World would gladly welcome a man such as this to take over the Presidency.

I realise that that the ideas asserted in this post probably do more to paint both Paul and myself as extremists than anything else, but I encourage readers to watch the Google interview and decide for themselves what the best course would be for the United States to follow.

Love and Castration

I have always found it bizarre that people profess their love for their pets, treating them in many respects better than fellow humans, yet castrate these beloved animals as a matter of course. In my view, castration is a vile mutilation and an extreme violation of a creature's dignity. An animal that requires castration for the purposes of taming perhaps should not be kept as a pet in the first place. Clearly there is a need to control population. Less invasive and potentially reversible measures such as vasectomies are more humane but rarely used alternatives.

Once again, technology comes to our rescue, allowing us to be more civilised. A new drug has been released in Australia which limits both sperm and testosterone production for several months thus fulfilling the targeted aspects of castration whilst preserving dignity and reversibility. There is an argument to be made for administering this to some people.

Photosynth

Microsoft has an impressive 3D photo viewing and analysis software, Photosynth, currently under development. A presentation from TED2007. Via Crooked Timber.