Bin Laden was bad, but Bruce was relentless...
In his recent Wall Street Journal essay Kip Hawley - former Transportation Security Agency administrator - sounds very much like is his former arch nemesis and voice of reason Bruce Schneier. Bruce's followers noticed. Bruce responded.
By the way, now that he's no longer head of the TSA, Kip has written a tell all book about what someone ought to do to fix his former agency.
The Reynoso Report is out...
The use of OC spray on passively resisting Occupy demonstrators at UC Davis in November 2011 certainly looked like the application of excessive force. Seems a task force helmed by retired state Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso agreed.
"Our overriding conclusion can be stated briefly and explicitly. The pepper spraying incident that took place on November 18, 2011 should and could have been prevented."
The report (the bulk of which the Kroll investigation contained in the appendix) is sharply critical of the administration and the police, but makes it clear that responsibility for the incident is shared by the trustees of the university, administrators, the chief of the police department, members of its command structure, and Lt. John Pike who actually pulled the trigger on the OC dispenser.
It was a bad day on the quad for everyone except the Occupy Movement,
who scored a gratuitous public relations coup. But it could have been worse. Choreographing an appropriate response to passive resistance and civil disobedience is not an escalation of force issue. It calls for cool heads and resolute hearts. The situation could have gone very badly wrong - a Kent State sort of wrong, no thanks to the actions, inactions, abdications, and bad calls of those in authority at UC Davis that day.
In the words of Sgt. Esterhaus, "Let's be careful out there."
Image by Louise Macabitas
What are the odds I'd regret skipping statistics sooner or later...
This has been covered pretty well in the various science blogs, but I find it fascinating.
Back in the middle 1970s Americans (okay, some Americans) followed the Viking 1 and Viking 2 robot spacecraft which landed on Mars in 1976. We nerds were enthralled to hear that a test for biological processes tested "positive" in each of the landers' chemistry labs. Reality intervened in short order as mission scientists and researcher in the field coalesced around a consensus that the positive result probably resulted from a chemical reaction that had nothing to do with the presence of life on the red planet. Oh well, we'd have to wait for a manned mission, which us space junkies assumed would occur sometime in the early 1980s. Hmmn.
Fast forward nearly four decades. Plenty of neat rovers and an awesome Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, but still no manned mission to Mars, or even a sample return mission. Then some scientists took another look at the Viking Program data using advanced statistical techniques. You know, the usual, "deep analysis of data structure along continua including signal vs. noise, entropy vs. negentropy, periodicity vs. aperiodicity, order vs. disorder using LZ complexity, Hurst exponents, Lyapunov exponents, Brock-Dechert-Scheinkman statistics, fractional correlation dimensions, etc."
In their paper Complexity Analysis of the Viking Labeled Release Experiments researchers Giorgio Bianciardi, Joseph D. Miller, Patricia Ann Straat, and Gilbert V. Levin argue, "if the LR gas evolution in the active experiments were entirely non-biological, it would sort with the other purely physical, rather than biological processes. In actuality, LR gas evolution in the active experiments sorted with the biological measures, while gas evolution controls (e.g. heat-sterilized) sorted with non-biological measures. We believe that these results provide considerable support for the conclusion that the Viking LR experiments did, indeed, detect extant microbial life on Mars."
Well, it's not a manned mission, or even a sample return mission, but it's pretty cool. Too bad there's no clue as to when we'll be visiting in person...
Sam Harris, the youngest of the four horsemen of the new atheist apocalypse, is playing with some interesting ideas "on the moral landscape." Along the way he skewers several religions, some traditional religious concepts, and even a couple religionists. He attracted the ire of theologians, philosophers of religion, philosophers, philosophers of science, and scientists alike for his proposal to apply consequentialism to morality by scientifically measuring the impact decisions have on the thriving of humans and other sentients. This book is not the most focused, but following Harris all over the place can be more enjoyable than reading lesser authors stick to their knitting. Harris writes with sharp wit and wicked turns of phrase.
Sounds about right...
eclec·tic \e-ˈklek-tik
adjective
1: selecting what appears to be best in various doctrines, methods, or styles
2: composed of elements drawn from various sources; also : heterogeneous
noun
: one who uses a method or approach that is composed of elements drawn from various sources : one who uses an eclectic method or approach
Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary
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