We hiked our first trail in Patapsco Valley State Park on Saturday. It was a peaceful two miles — thousands of flowers along the trail, the echoes of woodpecker activity, the gurgling of running water, and mountain bikers crashing down the hills.

I have spent one night in the last twenty years in Florida and it just so happens that the Space Shuttle Endeavour was launched that night. I had no idea there was a launch scheduled until I arrived at Cape Canaveral that afternoon. It was the RVs lining the road to the Air Force station that tipped me off. The security guard confirmed it. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity even if it did mean missing a lot of sleep to see the 2:20 am launch.

I awaited the launch on the edge of the base. There were hundreds of families, high school students and college spring breakers there. A favorite activity among the high school crowd was to mock the photographers with tripods and lenses as long as my leg by standing in front of their cameras without seeming to notice. I hadn't brought a tripod or my newer camera so I was limited to a point and shoot.

The general attitude among the teenagers was of being too cool to be there. They were talking to friends on cell phones, standing around in circles looking oblivious to the scene around them, and making jokes about last minute repairs that the shuttle might need. That ended quickly when the shuttle lifted off. At ignition, there was an audible gasp from everyone at the brilliant light. This video does a reasonable job of capturing what we saw (though with more detail). After several seconds of only seeing the shuttle take-off, we finally heard the rumble.

At some point while everyone was waiting around, some teenage boys were joking about swimming across the water to get a better look at the launch. A 7 or 8-year old boy quickly corrected their distance estimate. His fathered added some technical details to this and really impressed the high schoolers. At this, the father proudly told his son, "See, it pays to be a geek."

Every time I hear there is going to a meteor shower or a lunar eclipse, I promise that this is the time I will be out there watching it. Any every time I forget or decide I'd rather be in bed. I finally got out there this past Wednesday. It was tempting to give up hope due to the overcast skies but everything cleared up by 8 pm.

Since I was braving the cold, the camera came out with me to produce a record of this event. I set it up on our deck with its mode set to night-time shots. The first shot was a blurry, bright mess. I started running through the menus trying to recall how to get this thing into some sort of manual mode. But of course, this is a consumer camera that only grudgingly allows anything resembling manual control. These sorts of settings each require the navigation of 3 or 4 menus using tiny buttons—buttons that don't seem to be designed for adult fingers, especially not gloved, adult fingers.

I eventually found a mode that gave me a little more control and managed to get some decent photos. The one on the left shows the Earth's shadow beginning to obscure the full moon. When taking these shots, I had the choice of setting the exposure to catch the part of the moon in the shadow or the other part. It was impossible to get both. If you click on this link, you can see the moon just before full eclipse. It is a rust color with a very bright sliver still illuminated by the Sun. Saturn is the yellow dot off to the lower left and Regulus is the blue dot above the moon. I tried to convince Shannon it you looked really closely at Saturn you could see its rings. I don't think she believed me.

• We have finally added caller ID to our phone service. One of the first calls we subsequently received was from Verizon telling us the modification was complete. The caller ID read "Bell Atlantic".
• I greatly dislike introductions to books that give away major plot details. The most recent example of this is the mention of the sudden death of a main character in the introduction to Cranford. Argh.
• During the first World War, Germany experienced some extreme food shortages. They experimented with trying to develop butter substitutes from animals that were plentiful like rats, hamsters, crows and cockroaches.

This is just a commercial, but it is so well done. It features a documentary with the filmmaker Martin Scorsese discussing a "lost" manuscript of Hitchcock's that he is making into a short film. That is followed by the film. It really feels like a Hitchcock movie (partially because it contains so many references to his films).

Manners provide a veneer of caring and interest in others over the selfishness that naturally exists in people. (This definition is more negative than I intended, but it works.) It is a social expectation that acquaintances will exchange greetings and well-wishes upon meeting. I am interested in the question of when these interactions are judged to be an example of hypocrisy rather than politeness.

Let's consider two neighbors, Bob and Joe. They do not like each other. When they see each other on the street or in a store, they will greet each other with a ‘good morning’ and a ‘how are you doing?’. Neither of them actually cares how the other person is doing or truly wishes him well. They do this because it is a social norm.

Now let's take up the case of two co-workers, Greg and Tony. They despise each other though they try to hide that from the rest of the people at their office. Greg is actively working to get Tony fired and Tony knows this. Yet when they meet in the break room or at a work social function, they exchange pleasantries accompanied by smiles.

When does public politeness become hypocrisy or does it?

The worst two hours of your life Star Wars holiday special has now been compressed to five minutes.

Maybe I should have more sympathy for the airport screeners...

“I say, no one receives the same education [as anyone else]. Everyone, if I may put it this way, has for his preceptors the form of government under which he lives, his friends, his mistresses, the men by whom he is surrounded, his reading, and, finally, chance, that is to say, an infinite number of events whose causes and connections our ignorance does not permit us to perceive.”

I was recently asked by my undergraduate college to fill out a survey. The first question gave me pause. It was something along the lines of was I satisfied with the education that I had received. I wasn't thinking about education according to the broad outlines that Helvétius proposed. Perhaps I should have...

New Life Church is the church that Ted Haggard founded and led for twenty years. A quote from their new interim pastor caught my attention: “We feel a lot worse today than we did a week ago. But we were a whole lot worse off a week ago.” Many in that church might question whether they are better off now that their pastor has been fired due to drug problems and likely sexual infidelity. They certainly do not feel like they are in a better situation, but perception and truth are not the same thing.

This summer I read an Agatha Christie book titled Absent in the Spring. It is a single-character psychological thriller. A middle-aged woman is stranded in a deserted train station for a week in the Middle East. She has nothing to do except reflect on her life. These thoughts eventually lead to the climatic moment when she realizes that she is a horrible person making the lives of those close to her miserable. It was only this isolation that could force her to honestly evaluate her life and see truth rather than the reality she had constructed. Christie is careful to point out that it was the busyness (or rather the busybodyness) that protected her from the truth about herself. And, of course, once she re-enters her busy life, she excuses away her self-realization for the comfortable yet false world that she had created.

It seems to me that the modern world with its fast pace and endless entertainment does not encourage the quiet reflection necessary for separating perception and truth. In a Brave New World-sort of way we are kept amused and busy. We can think that we are happy and productive without having to struggle through any self-criticism. But this happiness is a perception that is fed by the images of the “good life” as portrayed by the mass media. What if we would rather have the perception of happiness and fulfillment regardless of the truth?

In his book The Rise of the Modern Paganism, Peter Gay states that

“Relativism, Eclecticism, and toleration are so intimately related that they cannot be strictly separated even in thought. Relativism is a way of looking at the world, recognizing that no single set of convictions has absolute validity; Eclecticism is the philosophical method consequent on relativism—since no system has the whole truth, and most systems have some truth, discriminating selection among systems is the only valid procedure. Toleration, finally, is the political counterpoint of this world view and this method...”

This is the view developed in the Enlightenment. There is truth, but it is scattered throughout different ideas, systems, and world views. This knowledge is to be pursued through criticism and debate in an open forum. In our contemporary, post-modern world, relativism dictates that the various world views are either equally true or that there is no absolute truth (and I would argue that these two positions are equivalent). Contemporary tolerance is not based around a search for truth but a denial of its existence or at least the possibility of finding it.

The United States government exists to serve its citizens. At a macro level, the government’s purpose is to ensure that the citizens of today and those of the future enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There are inherent trade-offs in carrying out that charter. Sometimes the government must limit the pursuit of happiness of a current generation in order to ensure it at some level for future generations (raising taxes to pay down the national debt, for instance).

These trade-offs exist in the war on terror (or war on tara as President Bush calls it). What is concerning is the apparent oblivion of the administration to this fact. The preservation of life has become the seemingly singular focus at the expense of liberty and happiness. In some cases, it appears that decisions that have significant negative impacts on liberty are being made for small or negligible increases in security against terrorism.

A funny example is the case of a geologist who was prevented from taking a specimen onto a plane because it was a dual-use item. It is actually only funny until one considers that the extensions of this could apply to practically anything that is carried onto a plane.

A recent item in the news was the appeal by the Bush administration of the ruling against the domestic wiretapping program. The National Security Agency has been spying on international phone calls involving parties within this country without obtaining a warrant. I have been unable to find a copy of the appeal online so all I have is this quote from it in a Reuters article: the judge's ruling “dismantles a tool that already has helped detect and disrupt al Qaeda plots”.

This quote illustrates my point nicely. Any argument for an action that deprives citizens of their freedom should discuss the significance of this effect against the benefits to the security of the nation. I have not seen this kind of careful thinking and analysis coming from the government. Instead, we are suppose to trust the administration's statements about the effectiveness of domestic spying program when it has not proven itself to be trustworthy. We are prevented from observing any rational discourse occurring concerning the trade-off between rights and safety. There are plenty of ways to disrupt al Qaeda plots. They must be debated though as to their effects on liberty before implementing them. The objective function to be optimized contains more than just a single independent variable. (Oops, how did that get in here?)

A flock of vultures has moved into our neighborhood. There are probably forty or fifty of them. They mostly sit in a group of old, mostly dead trees. Sometimes they take off and soar around looking for roadkill, but mostly they just sit there and vulch. They must also hang around the dumpster by the neighboring apartment complex for someone put up large balloons with big eyes painted on them. I assume they are suppose to scare away the vultures.

As I was driving home, I passed by that dumpster. There hung the yellow balloons with their big eyes and there sat a vulture oblivious to the scary balloons. Would have been a good photo. Oh well...

C.S. Lewis once said something about suffering along these lines: a part of suffering is its shadow; you not only suffer but you are constantly aware of the fact that you are suffering. I have not had to suffer much in my life. From my minor experience and observation of others, I see truth in that observation though. Happiness brings with it a disregard for time, maybe even a lack of self-reflection. In times of pain and grief, time seems to stop. The future seems to stretch on forever and yet be barren. You are painfully aware that you exist and that you are suffering.

I am interested in how man's view of time has changed down through the ages. Does modern man have the same understanding of wasting time as medieval man or ancient man? Does the Protestant work ethic and associated culture skew my perspective on how my time should be used?

Here is a quote I ran into by a Greek monk who lived on Mount Athos:

“Do not waste the precious time that God has given you to spend on good deeds ... Such a waste (of time, I mean) is more serious than that of material things because you will find all the material things you want, but not the time.”

Learning this was not enjoyable: A laptop's touchpad will not work if one is wearing winter gloves.

That is the slogan for U.S. Patent Certificates, Inc. I know this because I recently received my first patent and they were the first to congratulate me...with an offer to buy a certificate or plaque from them. Not just any plaque either, but one that is “prestigious and will unquestionably satisfy the most regal taste.” I cannot imagine hanging something like that on a wall. What do you say when someone asks who gave it to you. “Ah, well, I did.” Then again, I still have my graduate school diploma in the mailer it came in. I wonder how many other offers of congratulations I will receive from people wanting to sell me a personalized mug, ceramic mug, or a special certificate so that I can congratulate myself.

Car makers have made great improvements in preventing car thefts. My car key has an electronic tag embedded within it. The car is not suppose to start unless it can talk to that tag so the key has to at least be in the car. This makes the the car extremely difficult to hot wire. But there is an unintended consequence to this advancement in security — car thieves are starting to break into people's homes to steal the car keys.

I have been reading a history book focused on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It had an example of a similar unintended consequence to a security measure. With the use of canons, castle and city walls did not provide as much protection during sieges as they formerly did. An architectural response was to build large earthen bulwarks around the walls to absorb the shot and add bastions to provide better offensive positions for the defenders. The manning of the bastions required many more soldiers to be resident in the cities. This changed the strategy of advancing armies. Previously, they might have passed by a well-fortified city since it did not present a threat to the army. Now they tended to set siege to these cities. Otherwise, they were leaving a large military force behind them that could attack their vulnerable rear.

I ran across a list of books banned during the 2004-2005 school year. A lot of them didn't surprise me. You had the typical agenda books like George Has One Dad and Fourteen Mommies or The Attack of the Evil Split Infinitives, the books that use racial language that was acceptable back in the 1800's like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, and then those books that are probably a little inappropriate for elementary school libraries like Playboy: A Pictorial History.

One book on the list that caught my eye was The Giver. It's by Lois Lowry and is a dystopia novel — sort of a Brave New World for kids. It won a Newberry Medal in fact. I had read it a few years back and thought it was a really good book. It turns out that it is one of the most frequently banned books in the United States. I looked around for the reasons and found some really great quotes by the banning proponents such as these three:

“This book is negative. I read it. I don't see the academic value in it. Everything presented to the kids should be positive or historical, not negative.”

“It should be seen as a criminal act for this book to be presented for or made required reading for anyone under the age of twenty — thirty would be even better...”

“In reality it is being used to prepare children — not yet able to comprehend the nature of life — for ... an age when one is killed and disposed of like garbage for being the smaller of two identical twins.”

Of course, the whole message of the book is exactly the opposite of that last quote. The amazon page for the book lists over two thousand reviews so it has certainly generated quite a reaction (though many appear to be posted by students who have been forced to write a review by their teacher). If you're waiting for a movie of it to come out rather than read the book, you're in luck. It looks like Walden Media (the Narnia guys) will be producing a movie version. If you're still wondering what happened to Jonas, Lowry caved in and wrote a sequel.

I'll leave you with my favorite review from the Amazon site:

“It is about a kid named Jonas and an old guy who gives Jonas bad memories. The ending is so weird. The book makes you think too hard. It is bad.”

This will be the last post about Spain (at least I think it will be). On the way back from Seville, we flew into London before continuing on to Baltimore. In the London Heathrow Airport, I was “randomly selected” twice for a more invasive search. This was not based on any information on my ticket, but how I looked (or I guess it could have actually been random). Both times I was pulled out of line - once for a full pat down and the other time to do a complete search through my carry-on. For the full pat down, they were selecting one person out of the two security lines and the process took a few minutes. I am guessing that they were selecting 1 out of every 100 people. The carry-on search occurred as we were moving down the walkway to board the plane. It was a Boeing 767 with two aisles so the boarding process was pretty quick. Let's assume there were 4 people selected so the odds of my selection were 1 in 50. That means the overall odds of my double selection were 1 in 5,000 or 0.02 percent. My guess is that I looked like the kind of guy who would not raise a fuss if delayed for a few minutes.

We arrived in Spain on December 10 so the locals were already in the Christmas season. In Spain, it starts on the 8th with the feast of the Immaculate Conception and continues until January 6 (the Epiphany). The Spanish airline we flew on from London had the typical magazine in the seat pocket except that the articles were in both English and Spanish. The one that caught my eye was on the changing Christmas celebrations in Spain. The author attributed the diminishing emphasis on the traditional celebrations to the influence of American culture. In Spain, the three wise men bring gifts to the children on the eve of the Epiphany. Santa, though, is slowly strengthening his grip on the people of Spain and displacing the wise men. We saw a lot of blow-up Santas rappelling from balconies or beckoning shoppers into stores. Resistance is futile.

It is very easy to notice cultural differences when traveling. I find, though, that I am very unsure what is the appropriate scale of my observations of Seville — is something a Sevillan peculiarity, or maybe its Spanish or Continental or European? Whatever the correct generalization may be, the service in Sevillan restaurants is quite different from American ones. I wonder how much of this is driven by cultural values and how much by the economics.

Here are two observations: 1. Waitresses and waiters get paid a decent wage rather than depending on tips and 2. Sevillans spend a long time talking in restaurants. In the States, it is to the economic benefit of a waitress to move people through her tables as quickly as possible in order to accumulate as many tips as possible. This motivation is not significant in Seville due to the aforementioned wage levels and the minimal amount of tipping. So did the different economic restaurant calculus develop because of the culture, vice versa, or are they independent? I lean toward the last answer, but what do I know.

Of course, I ignored the owners of the restaurant in the above discussion. They always do better financially by moving people through the restaurant quickly. But are they strong capitalists? — probably not. There are other differences possibly caused by the different economics. The smaller number of patrons is offset by a diminished staff. There is neither hostess to seat you, nor busboy to clear the dishes or fill water glasses (no water glasses to be filled anyway). The waiter or waitress handle a larger number of tables. They do not hover around you asking questions about the meal. Instead, you signal when you need something. All of this makes for a very different dining experience.

While we were sitting on a park bench eating pastries (they have really good pastries in Seville), I noticed a young Sevillan couple across the plaza involved in some passionate love-making. They were completely oblivious to the world around them - the tourists walking by, the people posing for pictures right behind them, the school kids being led home by their grandmother. It didn't last too long as the young man took a call on his cell phone. The moment was lost for them. The spell was broken. After the interruption, they talked some, kissed a few times, but nothing like before.

It seems that the people of Spain have a better understanding of the number system than Americans do. The ground floor is considered to be floor 0. If you go down a level, it is floor -1. None of this silly switching to letters to denote floors below the ground floor. I gave my talk yesterday on floor -2 of the conference hotel.

They also use a 24 hour clock so there is never any confusion over am or pm. Fortuntely, they don´t ring the bells 23 times at 11 pm - especially since we are staying at an inn right next to Giralda.

I have been working on an extremely frustrating project for the past several months. I won't provide a complete picture since this is a public site and all, but here is a glimpse of what it has been like.

Every few days I come across something like this:
hold = dataPtr[3];
dataPtr[0] = dataPtr[3];
dataPtr[1] = dataPtr[2];
dataPtr[2] = dataPtr[1];
dataPtr[3] = hold;
I found this gem today. The guy who wrote this was trying to swap the byte ordering of a 32-bit variable. I should also note that he used this snippet of code over forty times (functions or macros...nah).

I thought this was a joke at first. A Veggie Tales version of Lord of the Rings?

In the few spare moments that I have had over the past month, I have been reading a book on the history of probability. It is not strictly a history book but takes a philosophical look at the development of the theory of probability. I was struck by the similarity between one of the major precursors of the Scientific Revolution and that of the Reformation.

During the Middle Ages, the opinions of the ancients (you know - Plato, Aristotle and friends) held a tremendous amount of weight. Truth was established through an appeal to their established opinion. This was considered the only form of evidence. For some reason, this changed in the 16th and 17th centuries in a very subtle way at first. People started asking why couldn't the earth be considered a witness to appeal to in addition to the authorities of old? Experiments provided the method of interrogating this witness. Soon these experiments became the dominant manner of determining scientific truth rather than the traditional appeal to Ptolemy or Galen. This fundamental change in man's understanding of evidence enabled the scientific advances that followed.

In a similar way, the primary authority during this time period in religious matters was the traditions of the Church. It took direct appeals to the Bible itself by Luther and others to spark the Reformation. The principle of sola Scriptura replaced the typical citation of church fathers and tradition. The Bible played the role of expert witness for the theologians just like the earth did for the scientists.

This week the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) of New York City announced a $212 million contract to install surveillance cameras in subway stations and also to upgrade cell phone reception in those areas. I am more interested in the justification for the former since I have done research in this area. Simply put, the claims made by the MTA official regarding the cameras were not made with any understanding of the technology. One of the special features of the cameras touted by the MTA rep is the ability to detect abandoned packages. She also said, “We hope (this) will detect the terrorists before an incident happens...”

Technology has become our magic.

My issues with the reasoning here are as follows:

1. Detecting Terrorists
   Terrorists do not wear uniforms. They look just like everyone else. Yes, a suicide bomber might wear a jacket in summer to hide his vest, but that is not detectable through an automated visual system.
2. Response Time
   Let's say for argument's sake that the system could automatically detect a suicide bomber. What can be done about it? They only way to prevent him from blowing himself up in the station is to prevent him from gaining access to the station. The cameras are in the station.
3. Detecting Abandoned Packages
   This is a really hard problem. People are actively researching it. With controlled lighting, little pedestrian traffic, and high contrast between the object and the background, we can do a decent job of this with computer vision techniques. Any attack would probably focus on a busy station. Plus, you can defeat this by putting the bomb in a garbage can or any number of others ways.
4. False Alarms
   This has been the bugaboo of many automatic video surveillance systems whether using motion detection or face recognition. Many objects get left on platforms. It could be the lunch bag from McDonald's or the suitcase of the confused tourist. Other possible detections could be from a partially obscured person standing still for a long time or a poster falling on the floor. Every time there is a detection, someone has to investigate — most likely bomb teams at first. Eventually, this is so much of an annoyance that this part of the system gets turned off and you're left with a conventional video surveillance system that is dependent on operators.

NPR had an interesting piece back in January about London using classical music in the subway stations to discourage youth from loitering there. They actually had a sizable decrease in robberies and vandalism from that point forward. Bruce Schneier also recently mentioned that 7-Eleven uses classical music in its stores to reduce loitering.

Let's suppose that classical music is the cause of the decrease in crime in the subway stations. Is there something inherent in classical music that calms people? Is it just the lack of exposure to this type of music that drives away the youth gangs? What would happen if the classical music were replaced by smooth jazz or blues?

Dr. James Dobson made some comments last week about stem cell research that have stirred up certain segments of the population. I have not seen any coverage by the major media organizations—just local papers (Colorado), Jewish organizations, and some media watchdog websites. You can read or listen to his comments here. A common theme running through the reactions is that Dr. Dobson called stem cell researchers Nazis or that stem cell research is equivalent to Nazi human experiments. I do not see this in his comments.

The main quote of interest is as follows:
“In World War II, the Nazis experimented on human beings in horrible ways in the concentration camps, and I imagine, if you wanted to take the time to read about it, there would have been some discoveries there that benefited mankind. You know, if you take a utilitarian approach, that if something results in good, then it is good. But that's obviously not true.”

I understand Dr. Dobson to be saying that the ends do not justify the means*. The Nazi experiments are an obvious example of that. Any possible gain in medical knowledge is not worth the forced suffering that the subjects had to experience. That being said, I believe he made two significant mistakes (if he is interested in discussion or debate on this issue).

1. Referring to anything dealing with the Nazis is a mistake in a discussion because it is emotionally charged. Outrage is the normal response and that is not really conducive to reasoned dialogue.
2. Dobson is confusing two different issues: the ethics of harvesting stem cells in particular ways and the ethics of stem cell research itself. Most people have no moral difficulties with transplanting organs of people who have suddenly died. Killing people to harvest their organs is a completely different issue.

Who is Dr. Dobson? Dobson is a Christian psychologist who recently has become active in commenting on social and political issues that could be called “value issues” such as gay marriage, abortion and confirmation of conservative judges.

*Note: Dobson later said that he called stem cell research Nazi-esque. I am only claiming that he did not imply that in his comments referred to above.

It has been 75 years since Grant Wood painted American Gothic. There was an enjoyable interview on NPR about it (click the Listen link at the top). One discussed topic was the interest people have in creating parodies of it.

I was reading The Count of Monte Cristo on the plane during the flight to Las Vegas. In the book there is a scene set in Rome during a carnival. Everyone is wearing masks. These masks allow people to do whatever they desire — even if it is outside what is morally or socially acceptable in Rome. They are emboldened due to the anonymity provided by the mask.

Las Vegas reminded me of this carnival. Instead of putting on a mask to hide your activities from your neighbors, you are traveling to a different city. The atmosphere was very similar to the carnival. People are encouraged to throw aside their inhibitions. It is a place where it is completely normal to see “hundreds of thousands of rhinestones, covering practically nothing.”

The idea of what constitutes a just war has been discussed and debated for centuries. The questions of when and how an army should withdraw from an occupied country are relatively new ones. These questions are particularly relevant for this time because of the war against and occupation of Iraq. I will put forth the argument that the answers to these questions have to be developed in the context of the justification of the war. If the war were fought in self-defense due to an invasion by the now occupied nation, the victors are under no moral obligation to restore it. It would behoove the occupiers to not leave the nation in shambles as can be seen from the aftermath of World War I in Germany, but there is no moral imperative to do so. In contrast, if the justification of the war centered on gross violations of universal human rights occurring within a nation, the occupiers have an obligation to ensure that the citizens of that nation are in better conditions after the withdrawal than before the war.

The changing justification for the war on Iraq makes the analysis of a withdrawal all the more complicated. Initially, the war was justified as a preemptive action to eliminate a serious threat to the United States's security. The weapons of mass destruction have not been discovered in Iraq, and the evidence of their existence has proved to be very shaky at best. The removal of Saddam Hussein as dictator for the benefit of the people of Iraq has become the post-invasion justification. I believe this leaves the United States with the responsibility of rebuilding the infrastructure of Iraq, helping to create a legitimate, functioning government and ensuring a stable security environment. Without this, a withdrawal will leave the Iraqis worse off and so would not satisfy the humanitarian aims of the war. Satisfying this ethical obligation comes at a high cost, but it is the right thing to do. As the kindergarten adage goes, “You made the mess; you clean it up.”

What do you think? Does the shifting justification for the war affect the United States's postwar responsibilities? If deposing a dictator were the aim of a war, is the attacking nation under any obligations after this has been accomplished? Do you agree with my premise that the justification of the war determines or at least heavily influences how and when the occupiers withdrawal?

As I was backing my car down the driveway this morning, I saw a pair of cardinals sitting in a tree in the front yard. They have built a nest somewhere on our property, but we are not sure where. Shannon thinks it could be in a big bush next to the kitchen window, but I have seen a robin fly into it a few times. It doesn’t look big enough for the peaceful cohabitation of both a family of robins and cardinals. It could be in the overgrown forest of forsythia and lilac bushes on the other side of the house. I have tried to get a good photo of the cardinals to put in my work-in-progress photo gallery. No luck so far. They must have known that I didn’t have my camera with me, which is why they posed so nicely. I was tempted to run back into the house for the camera, but I knew it would end in failure.

There is another pair of cardinals at work. Well, I assume there is a pair because I have only seen the male. I was walking up the stairs to my office when I heard a “poink” sound on the ten-foot windows around the staircase. It sounded like the sound a pebble thrown at the glass would make. I heard it again and looked up to see a cardinal falling down to the ledge. It was a controlled fall. He sat for a while looking at the glass and then flew back to the neighboring magnolia tree. A second or two later I heard the same sound again accompanied by the cardinal falling/flying down to the ledge. This process repeated several times. In fact, it has now been a week of hearing “poink” coming from the staircase as the cardinal flies into the glass again and again. The tree is close to the windows so he doesn’t have time to build up much speed. Our theory is his mate has a nest in the tree and he views his reflection in the window as a threat. He may end up killing himself to protect his future offspring from his reflection.

Poink.

Poink.

Poink…

I thought this joke fit well with the previous post.

Three guys from the CIA, Mossad, and the Iranian Secret Police have a competition. Each of them has a burlap sack, and must go into the jungle to capture a wild boar. The CIA goes first. 30 minutes later, he's back with a wild boar in the sack. Mossad goes next, and he comes back in just 15 minutes with a similar catch.

The Iranian Secret Police goes next. He's back in 2 minutes. The CIA and Mossad are shocked. "No, you can't have already caught a wild boar."

"Open the sack and see for yourself." The CIA and Mossad look in the bag and see a rabbit with cigarette burns, bruises, cuts, and possibly a few broken bones.

"That's not a boar, that's a rabbit. You lose."

On hearing this, the rabbit shrieks out, "No!!!!!! I'm a wild boar! I've been a wild boar for seven years. I can give you the names of other wild boars who are still loose in the jungle!"

One of the important points made in the 9/11 Commission Report is the problem caused by the current compartmentalization of intelligence information. This system made sense in the Cold War when the emphasis was on preventing a mole from accessing too much information. Trying to prevent terrorism has very different requirements for information sharing which is hindered by this type of security setup.

Another problem is the over-classification of information. Much of it stems from an attitude of superiority over those seeking to do us harm. If we do not tell them how to build a nuclear bomb, they will not be able to figure it out.

A less obvious reason for over-classifying information is the lack of incentive to release information. When a hard question is asked, it is a lot easier to say "I can't discuss that because it is classified" than to admit you do not know the answer. The same thing goes for covering up mistakes.

You can see this most clearly from the almost glacial speed at which information is downgraded in its classification. It is not uncommon for a piece of information that is classified to be commonly held knowledge in the world. Is that information downgraded? No, it becomes a running joke in the intelligence community.

Speaking of jokes, one of my favorite examples of the downgrade process can be found in a memo describing terrorist threats around the time of Christmas in 1974. This memo has been released twice in the last ten years. The second time it was released to the National Security Archive, and the memo can be found here. You will notice a large section of text is redacted on the last page under the heading Terrorist Threats and Plans: Worldwide. A reasonable question to ask is what sort of terrorist threat that occurred 30 years ago still needs to be classified today.

The answer to that question comes from another version of the same document released to the Gerald Ford Presidential Library two years earlier and can be found here. In that document we read that there was a threat to the prime minister of the North Pole by the Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge. Obviously, the second reviewer must have felt it necessary to protect the children from the devastating visual imagery of good ole Saint Nick and his reindeer being taken down by a surface-to-air missile. The CIA staffer two years earlier had no such qualms and released the information to the public.

If you are interested in reading more of this sort of stuff, head on over to the National Security Archive website.