About 2:30 on Thursday, Wasp calls up and says that my car, my baby, my constant companion for the past ten and a half years was dead.  Dead. Dead! DEAD!!  Well, actually, it’s not dead yet, but it had a terminal injury and would be dead in maybe 100 miles.  PANIC!  No, don’t panic.  I was expecting the noise to be fatal all day on Thursday, so I had checked out a few car places and was contemplating buying a car that night.

One really shouldn’t impulse buy a car.  Instead, I made an appointment to see a Prius over at Carmax on Friday.  I had a recommendation for Auction Direct and I saw an interesting Prius at another used car dealership nearby.  I called Bill Rankin who generously offered to loan me their truck for a few days.  I picked up my car from Wasp, drove it to Bill’s, borrowed his truck and was set for the night.

Friday, I left work early, picked up my title and spare key from K and drove in to Raleigh.  The Prius at the used car dealership was okay.  It seemed to be in mediocre shape, tires weren’t worn down, but they weren’t new either, however it was a 2009.  I left there and drove down to Carmax for my appointment to see a 2008 Prius.  This one was about $1k more, same mileage, but had more features.  The problem was that I really hated the service at Carmax.  It was everything I had been warned about.  Even though I had an appointment, and had been called about it a half hour before, the salesperson I had spoken to was busy, so they had to track down someone else.  They kept pushing their warranties.  They wanted to use their financing which was about 3% higher than what I wound up with, etc.  It turns out that Carmax salespeople work on commission, go figure.  I asked if they could hold the car for a day or two so that I could get financing in order.  They said, “no.”  kthxbai

Finally, I went over to Auction Direct.  They didn’t have any Priuses, but did have a very nice 2008 Honda Civic Hybrid that was about $3k less than the Carmax Prius. I drove it for a bit, decided I liked it and went ahead with the purchase.  The Civic Hybrid feels like more of a regular car than a prius.  There isn’t a big center LCD display with a graphic showing you when you are charging and when you are draining the batteries.  Instead, there are a couple of discrete extra guages that provide the exact same information. I like the fact that it uses regular tires, as opposed to the expensive, short-lived low-profile tires of my old Celica.

The only problem was that it took forever to finish up.  I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was tired and ready to go home.  I didn’t get out of there until about a quarter to seven.  After all of that, I was not very good company when I got a chance to see my friends.  I hope y’all forgive me.  I’m doing better this morning, but it has been a long week.

My brother (the architect) and his wife (the interior decorator designer [sorry nikki!]) have been incredibly helpful. I showed them some things that I liked and they made recommendations, for improvement. Perhaps the funniest part to me is that when I was showing them what I was thinking, they made the comment that they didn’t realize my furniture tastes were so contemporary. If they both weren’t so nice, and didn’t work in so many different styles, I would have sworn what they said was “we didn’t realize you had good taste.”

So, in case anyone’s interested, here’s what I’ve picked out.

From the first image, a sofa, love seat, coffee table and end tables.  From the second, the dining room table, a bench and four chairs.  From the third, just the entertainment center.  Then the rug, a couple of lamps and a screen (no idea what I’ll use the screen for, but there it is ).

All of it should look very nice in the loft apartment and isn’t unreasonable with respect to the art deco bedroom set.  Now I can’t wait for it to arrive.

Recently, I was talking to my neighbor, the very kind, interesting and extremely conservative Glenn Beck viewer. While we were talking, he brought up Muslims and his fear that they were trying to take over the country (apparently, religious appropriation of a country is only okay if it’s Christian – but that’s another story). According to my neighbor, no religious Muslim could ever possibly be up to any good. I don’t explicitly recall him calling Islam a false religion, but he very much believed that you couldn’t trust “them,” that they were all radicalized and out to destroy “our” way of life.

At the time, I countered by noting that while in graduate school, I knew several Muslims that were all very good people, moreover, I would be surprised if any of them have converted to a fundamentalist form of Islam. My advisor was a (I believe non-practising) Muslim. One of the best and kindest professors in my department was a practising Muslim – on his office wall, he had a discrete prayer calendar reminding him of the appropriate times to pray. Moreover, there were several Muslim graduate students in my research group, including a gentleman named Hakan.

Hakan was a great guy (presumably he still is, I just haven’t seen him in several years). At the time, K and I lived in a town house a couple of miles from my office, in a part of the city that was growing. Because of the population growth, the city decided to put in a new water pumping station just down the street. Unfortunately, we had plastic piping in and leading up to the town house. When they first started testing the new station, a pipe burst in the front yard. We had a plumber come out, dig it up and fix it. Shortly thereafter, a new spot went and I did the digging and repairing myself. Finally, after the third time, I had enough. I was going to (hand!) dig a trench between the water meter and the house and put in copper piping.

Well, I mention this to my officemates, and Hakan volunteers to help dig the ditch. He came out on Saturday morning and we spent several hours in the sun, digging the trench and tunneling under the sidewalk. After a couple of hours, I asked him if he wanted some lunch or something to drink. He said that he couldn’t – it was Ramadan and therefore, forbidden. I was horrified that I had him out in the sun, digging a ditch while he couldn’t eat or drink. It wasn’t the middle of summer, but I recall it being hot enough that I was worried about his health. Regardless,  he persevered and we got the copper piping installed. Thinking back on it, my understanding is that a part of Ramadan is service and in taking his beliefs more seriously than many people I know, he was both abiding by the fasting requirements of Ramadan and helping his officemate, even if it was physically taxing.

I do understand why people would be concerned about fundamentalism in Islam, I’m concerned about it too. But I’m also concerned about fundamentalism in Christianity and most other religions for that matter. But those who think that all Muslims are radical or that all of Islam is somehow tainted by the radicals, need to spend some time with Hakan or any of the other Muslims that have positively affected my life.

I started playing with the API and as a first cut thought it would be neat to use the “get_similar” function.  So for each artist, you can get the top N similar artists.  Now where can I get a list of artists I like?  Well, I could type ‘em in, but that sucks.  So I wrote a small program which:

1. Opens the database on my iPod (or a directory of mp3 files)
2. Finds each artist by either reading the iPod db or looking at the id3 tags in all of the files
3. For each artist, add a node to a graph where the area of the node is proportional to the number of songs that artist has on the iPod (or in the music folder)
4. For each artist, finds the top 50 similar artists
5. For all of the similar artists that are in my collection of artists, add a graph edge between the two nodes
6. Plot the graph

What can I say, I’ve been working on a fair amount of graph-theory at work recently.  So after processing my iPod, I came up with the following graph of my current music (click to embiggen):

Okay, that’s pretty cool.  Almost completely illegible, but cool.  FWIW, the graph has 15 connected components, unfortunately, 13 of them are “singles” (not connected to anything), with one pair (Louis Armstrong paired with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington).  Fortunately, the graphing tool I use (igraph), has built in tools for doing community analysis (using the leading eigenvector method), i.e., we can automatically find tightly coupled subgraphs.  A few examples from the 25 or so communities:

which arguably correspond to “Indie,”  “Classic Rock,”  “Jam Bands,”  “Guitar Gods,” and “Alternative.”  If I processed my complete music database, I suspect we would wind up with several other communities, e.g., Blues.  But since Robert Johnson is the only blues I’ve got on there right now… he’s in a class by himself.

I suppose it goes w/o saying, that my musical tastes aren’t everyone’s and that if you don’t like my musical tastes, you can keep it to yourself or go DIAF

So, what’s next?  I was talking with M from my office and we’ve come up with another interesting project for the Echo Nest API.  This one a) uses the audio analysis functions, and b) if we do it right might cause someone to send us a cease and desist.  So, win all the way around.

When I first got the digital camera, the workflow became: auto-correct the color balance using the Nikon’s color profile, then select the images I liked.  Great!

Unfortunately, over the years, my SLR has gotten dust on the sensor, because I was doing what Nikon said and not mucking with the sensor to try to clean it.  So, first thing is that I should ignore Nikon and actually clean the sensor.  But the second thing is that this has really screwed with my workflow.  Last year, after identifying the “good” images, I had to manually go through them and use the Heal tool in the GIMP in order to get rid of a few dust spots.  Well, dust is cumulative and this year it was worse than ever.  In particular, the dust was more noticeable because I was shooting a lot of waterfalls… long exposures with a small aperture – dust city.  Take a look at the following:

To some extent or another, that’s on every single image I took while K and I were on vacation.

I could repeat my old workflow, but that would take days.  New idea:  there is a tool in the GIMP called the Smart Remove Selection.  It takes a selected bit of the image and replaces it with textures from the surrounding area.  It’s comparable to Photoshop’s content-aware fill.  So, if I can select all of the visible dust, I can clean it at one time.  But that’s still slow.

Instead, I selected all of the dust from the image above.  Grew the selection by 10 pixels, converted it to a path and then saved the path as an SVG file.  Since the dust is at the same location in each image, a single dust file is relevant to all of my images.

Now all I have to do is to open an image, import the path, convert the path to a selection and apply the smart remove.  That’s a little better, but still means that I have to touch each file manually.

Enter GIMP scripting.  Last night, I wrote a script that takes a file glob, converts it to a list of files, and for each file automatically removes the dust and color corrects the image.  It still takes about a minute per file, but it’s completely automated.  Unfortunately, the first version of the script only handled horizontal images.  But since I always turn the camera clockwise when I shoot vertically, I was able to modify it to rotate the image appropriately, apply the dust removal and then rotate the image back i the height of the image is greater than the width.

The results are pretty great for a system I can just run over night:

Honestly, I can’t believe that we’re talking about a state where you might expect law enforcement to request your papers.

I did have a few questions, including what exactly does the law require?  And how will it be enforced?  In a nutshell, the law:

Requires officials and agencies to reasonably attempt to determine the immigration status of a person involved in a lawful contact where reasonable suspicion exists regarding the immigration status of the person, except if the determination may hinder or obstruct an investigation.

Okay, so, how does one form a reasonable suspicion?  Well, good for Arizona, the law further:

Stipulates that a law enforcement official or agency cannot solely consider race, color or national origin when implementing these provisions, except as permitted by the U.S. or Arizona Constitution.

So, I don’t know what is permitted by the Arizona Constitution, maybe all of those forms of profiling, maybe none.  But one final question, given that the mayor of Phoenix doesn’t support the law, how do you guarantee that it gets enforce?  Well, a citizen can sue if there’s a policy that doesn’t support enforcement:

Allows a person who is a legal resident of this state to bring an action in superior court to challenge officials and agencies of the state, counties, cities, towns or other political subdivisions that adopt or implement a policy that limits or restricts the enforcement of federal immigration laws to less than the full extent permitted by federal law.

Requires the court to order any that a violating entity pays a civil penalty of at least $1,000 and not to exceed $5,000 for each day that the policy has remained in effect after it has been found to be violating these provisions.

A few thoughts:

1. It’s not clear to me how one forms a reasonable suspicion about the immigration status of the person, except given their ethnic background
2. It’s not clear to me that ethnic background is even restricted as a category for consideration in the law, based on Latinos being Caucasian and questions about what is permitted under Arizona’s constitution
3. Given #1 and #2 above, I don’t think people realize how ineffective ethnicity is in determining legal status

Fortunately, statistics gives us a good answer to #3.  For the following, let’s consider that L indicates Latino, and I represents illegal.

Bayes rule tells us that the probability of being illegal given that you are Latino [ Pr(I | L) ] is the probability of being illegal (the prior, Pr(I)) times the probability of being Latino given that you are Illegal (likelihood, Pr(L|I)) divided by the evidence or the probability of being illegal given Latino and given not Latino [Pr(L|I)*P(I) + Pr(L| not I)*Pr(not I)]

so, Pr(I|L) = Pr(L|I) * Pr(I) / (Pr(I|L) + Pr(I| not L))

We can quantify this somewhat, from StateMaster

The population of AZ = 5,939,292

Legal Hispanic/Latino population of AZ = 1,803,377

Estimated number of illegals in AZ = 283,000

If we assume that all illegals are Hispanic, then:

P(I) = 283,000 / 5,939,292 = .04765

P(L|I) = 1.0

P(L| not I) = 1,803,377 / 5,939,292 = .30364

So, the probability of being illegal given that you are Latino is:   .14147 or ~14%.  Which in my mind is no reason to form a suspicion.  Hell, more that 14% of the population are pot smokers, you wouldn’t want to give the police authority to stop and arrest everyone to find that subset who are.

CAVEATS AND NOTES

• The data above are from 2000 and may not be current; however, illegal immigration shows a strong economic correlation and the economy is down compared to the boom year of 2000, so the numbers are probably in the right ballpark
• I don’t believe that Pr(L  | I) = 1.0.  This says that all illegals are Latinos.  That’s bull.  There are plenty of Asian and European illegals.  Adjusting this probability down will significantly decrease Pr(I | L).  For example, assuming P(L|I) = 0.8 results in P(I|L) = ~.116.
• The above analysis assumes that Bayes’ law is true, but if it isn’t then we’re all seriously screwed.
• Finally, I would be uncomfortable with racial profiling even if Pr(I|L) > 0.5.  It’s just not America when the cops stop and ask you for your citizenship papers.  I can think of a few places where that did occur, but won’t risk the Godwin retraction by invoking them.

So, what to do?  I was challenged a few years ago as to my solution to the illegal immigrant “problem.”  My first response is that you are assuming it’s a problem.  After all, studies have shown that low-wage legal and illegal immigrants actually grow an economy.  Moreover, since many pay into Social Security and Medicare, without receiving benefits, that helps those programs.  OTOH, it’s not fair to have them pay in without receiving services; moreover, the social safety net should be expanded to help all those in our community.  So, in that sense illegal immigration is a problem.   However, the solution is straight forward.  Enforce current laws restricting a business’s ability to hire illegals.  Illegals come here due to the draw of jobs.  Businesses love ‘em because they often work below minimum wage, and don’t complain about things like OSHA requirements.  Fine – regulate the businesses better and we’ll have fewer illegal immigrants.

This explains everything. Apparently those of us that are blessed with beards are deemed to be more credible than our clean shaven brethren. At least that seems to be the case for neat, medium length beards. And unless we’re trying to sell underwear… go figure.

I wonder if there’s trust-worthiness scale for beard-type? Inter-webz to the rescue:

Please note that my full beard is very trustworthy. My father’s “cop mustache” aka “The Burt Reynolds” is mildly trustworthy. And my brother’s, circa 2000, soul patch put him somewhere between threatening and dangerous.

Assuming (which I don’t) that the processes of the brain were completely deterministic, chaos theory tells us that they would not be predictable (what’s the solution to the three-body problem? [other than a king-sized bed]).  Moreover, the processes themselves are dependant on physicalities small enough that quantum effects are relevant and therefore the state changes contain a strong stochastic component.

Philosophically speaking, none of this affects the way we should live.  Education, punishment, personal interaction all affect the state of the brain and are therefore worthwhile [and inform my position that the real purpose of the criminal code should be rehabilitation and not warehousing, punishment or societal retribution... but that's a post for another time].

Yesterday, I heard the coolest story on NPR.  In a nutshell, moral judgements are apparently influenced by the right temporoparietal junction so that a magnetic pulse disrupting that region of the brain affects those judgements.  In the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), the researchers told one of four stories to the participants.  The stories addressed permutations of effect (neutral or negative) and intent (neutral or negative).  So, one story described an unintentional (neutral intent) poisoning resulting in death (negative effect), another described an intentional (negative intention) failed poisoning (neutral effect), etc.

When making moral judgements, adults generally consider intention.  So if you didn’t intend to poison someone and did, it’s understandable; whereas if you intended to poison and failed, you are still morally culpable.  This is exactly what the researchers found in their controls.  However, after disrupting the right temporoparietal junction, participants started making moral judgements based on the effect.  You intended to kill someone, but failed?  No problem, the person is still alive.  You didn’t mean to kill someone and did?  You bad person, someone died.  Apparently, this is common in children before they learn to make moral judgements based on intention.

So, in a nutshell, temporarily altering the physicality of the brain affects people’s thoughts with respect to moral judgements.  I’ll consider that support for my position that the mind arises from the physicality of brain and any belief you have in a free will separate from those physical processes is an illusion.

1. The one that I described
2. A random selection of which team would win (50/50 chance)
3. Always picking the top seeded team
4. A model suggested by a colleague at work

For each model, I ran 10,000 tests and compared them to the current NCAA tournament results, counting the scores for each test.  Results are:

The X axis is the score (0-64 at this point), the Y axis is the number of test runs (out of 10k) that achieved that score.  The number in the legend is the expected value (score) for each model.  As you can see, my model had the [second] highest expected value.  Choosing the top seeded team was the worst (guaranteed 10 points) best [see the 2nd update].  Choosing randomly was better than selecting the top seed the worst [see update] and my colleague’s model (cyan) was between my model and the random model.  Not bad.  I’ll update after the next two rounds of the tournament.

Update: one interesting thing is that this suggests that there was still a lot of luck in my ESPN pick.  Only about 0.5% of my model runs were as good as that one.

Update 2: So, I’m lying in bed when it occurs to me that I’m an idiot… the team with the *lowest* seed wins a game in Model 3.  This is why I say I don’t really know basketball.

Oh, sorry.  Where was I?  Apparently, there’s this basketball thing going on.  Some sort of NCAA tournament that will prove who has the best basketball team.  But what if it doesn’t?  What if it’s all just arbitrary?  Could it be that the chances of any team winning a game are not deterministic, but rather stochastic?  I’ll admit that I don’t know that much about basketball.  I mean, I played the sport in junior high.  I do know the rules.  And I even think that it’s a pretty game.  But I don’t follow the ins and outs of a particular season.

So what’s a guy to do when he doesn’t really follow basketball, but you live in NC where bball is life and it’s bracket time?

You model it.   Which is exactly what I did.

The basic model:

1. Compute a team’s wins minus their losses, I’m sure there’s a word for this, but let’s call it demonstrated strength (D)
2. For a given match-up, take a draw from a Beta distribution parameterized by each team’s demonstrated strength (D1 and D2)
3. The resulting draw is the probability that the team representing the first parameter wins
4. Draw from a uniform random variable to predict if that team actually will win

There are some flaws with the model, the two obvious ones:

1. Different teams have different schedules, so one team with a 30-5 record might be a lot better than another with a 30-5 record in a different conference (I’m looking at you SEC)
2. It’s not clear that you should parameterize directly on the demonstrated strengths.  There should probably be a scaling factor in there.  So that rather than drawing from Beta(D1, D2), you should draw from Beta(alpha*D1, alpha*D2)

But this is close enough.  The nice features of the model are:

1. The expected probability that a team will win is proportional to D1/(D1+D2).  So, a team whose wins outnumber their losses by 10, will have an expected probability of winning of 50% when playing against another team with D2=10.  And only a 33% chance of winning when playing against someone with a D2=20
2. The closer two teams’ demonstrated strength is to zero, the broader the probability distribution is.  This reflects added uncertainty for two teams who win only slightly more often than they lose.
3. The larger two team’s demonstrated strength is, the narrower the probability distribution is.  For example, D1=20, D2=40 has the same expected probability as D1=10, D2=20; but because this is a more common pattern for the two teams, we don’t have the same variance.
4. This is actually pretty rigorous in Bayesian terms.  Throughout the season, we can update the posterior distribution of the probability of winning based on the prior distribution and the most recent game.

So, how well does the model work?  Good question.  I used it on ESPN, and it’s currently ranked in the 92.9th percentile, i.e., better than almost 93% of all ESPN brackets.  All of my final four teams are still alive, and in general, the model predicted several of the biggest upsets in the tournament (e.g., Murray State vs Vanderbilt!).  That said, this is just one random draw from the model.  To test it further, I would like to go through a whole season of games and figure out if the probabilities of winning correspond to the statistics of a Beta distribution for the game’s D1 and D2.  Moreover, I would like to infer the alpha parameter that I mention above.

If the model appears accurate, and we can properly infer alpha, then we get a probabilistic assessment of how feasible it is to even pick tournament champions.  It may just be that at the end of the day, it comes down to luck.

Since then, President Obama has gotten more involved, and Nancy Pelosi (who love her or hate her will go down in history as one of the most effective Speakers of the House in recent memory) started working on her colleagues and the odds went up significantly.  In the past week, it looked almost certain that the House would pass the Senate’s bill and then fix the worst budgetary issues in reconciliation.  It was looking so certain, that the ignorant cretins in the teaparty were out in force, spitting and hurling racist and homophobic comments at legislators.

In spite of all that happened, last night the House did vote to pass the Senate bill.  Then came a Republican motion to recommit the reconciliation bill in an effort to spike the whole thing by driving a wedge between the pro-choice and anti-abortion wedges of the Democratic party.  That failed after Bart Stupak gave an impassioned speech saying that he believed that the current senate language plus the president’s executive order did uphold the Hyde amendment and that the bill was pro-life.  In his words, the bill was pro-life because it not only protected children before they were born, but it helped to ensure that their mothers received pre- and post-natal care, that the children would have insurance and that we know that children and families with insurance are healthier than those without.

Over the past few months, I’ve called Stupak a wanker on more than one occasion, but last night he stepped up and helped to pass health care reform for everyone.  After the vote to recommit, I went to bed (it was after 11pm and I was a bit tired), but the reconciliation bill was voted upon and also passed!

What’s next?  Well, the senate will probably pass the reconciliation bill today.  That will clean up the crap that they had to stick into the bill in order to overcome a republican filibuster.  The President will sign the bill Tuesday.  Then we’ll start seeing some changes.  The bill was begin to close the doughnut hole for drug coverage that the Republicans put into Medicare Part D.  It will begin to limit the insurance companies’ ability to shaft policy holders.  And by 2014, we’ll see the mandate that everyone must have insurance coverage, even if it is subsidized for the poor. Sometime between now and 2014, Democrats will hopefully start to improve the bill.  We still may not get to single payer any time soon, but we might get a public option.

From my standpoint, not too much will change.  I’ll continue to receive insurance through my company.  The congressional budget office (CBO) projects that my company’s costs for insurance will go down about 3%.  Best of all, I stop having to worry about losing insurance if I lose my job or decide to change jobs.  Hell, this even gives me some freedom to consider starting my own business without worrying as much about how to afford health insurance.  All in all, passing HCR was an amazing effort and I’m proud to have watched it happen.

[1] FWIW, this is why I still consider myself to be an Independent, even though I almost always vote Democratic – the Democrats are just too fearful of the political consequences of their own popular platform planks?!  Personally, I prefer a much more muscular liberal set of policies than the Democrats are usually willing to consider… even if they agree that those policies would be better for the country.

Laundry and dishes are done, next up… showers for everyone!

Sunday I (finally) put some seeds in the garden beds for spring veggies.  The usually: spinach, arugula, mesclun, peas, onions and swiss chard.  That’s when things started to go wrong.  I turned the sprinkler on the plants and things looked fine.  I went back into the house to clean up and noticed the water pressure dropping.  Yep.  It seemed like the water pump was off again.  The breaker this time.  I checked the easy places – no obvious signs of a short, so the problem is likely underground.  Hopefully the plumber can fix it this afternoon when he comes by.  He’ll probably have to replace the whole wire set… all 300′ of it.

So we didn’t get to clean up dinner dishes.  Getting the polenta off of the pot is not going to be fun.  Then I couldn’t sleep last night.  When I did fall asleep, I was troubled by some very disturbing dreams that, uncharacteristically, I remembered when I woke up.  Then to top it all off… no shower this morning.  *bleh*

1. One of NC’s representatives, Patrick McHenry (R) has proposed that we put Reagan’s face on the $50 bill.  Maybe for his work on voodoo tinkle on trickle down economics?  Although there is some appropriate irony to giving Reagan the $50… it’s a bill that most people don’t use.  Personally, I’m not rich enough to deal in $50s, $20s maybe.  Hey, if we’re redesigning money, why don’t we give more important presidents more prominent spots.  Jefferson definitely outranks Reagan and he’s on the never used $2 bill.  What about Madison?  The dude practically wrote the Constitution.  Shouldn’t those of who don’t use $5,000 bills get a chance to see him?
2. And closer to home, the newly minted republican majority on the Wake county school board has succeeded in rolling back a nationally recognized program to improve educational outcomes by ensuring socio-economic diversity.  Sure, I was bussed in elementary school.  It wasn’t the most enjoyable experience of my life, but at the same time, I think that it was good for me as a person to be exposed to other socio-economic groups at school.  Moreover, the program in Wake has demonstrated that it reduces the achievement gap between poor/minority students and rich/white students.  That’s gotta be worth a little time on the bus.

<sigh> Music for the evening: Danger Mouse’s and Sparklehorse’s Dark Night of the Soul and Titus Andronicus’s The Airing of Grievances.  They seem to capture the mood.

Now, in fairness, the sheriff claims that the program is not a militia, but:

will provide for self-sufficiency in the event of a manmade or natural disaster or a terrorist attack. Exodus will take local volunteers, train them and use them in response to a catastrophic disaster in the area. These volunteers will work in conjunction with the Bossier Sheriff’s Office to secure and protect viable resources in such an event.

For the record, this is B.S.  The sheriff wants the operation to sound like an adult version of the Boy Scouts where his parish will “always be prepared.”  But I was a cub scout, I’m pretty certain that I would have stayed on for the Boy Scouts if we were going to have access to “the war wagon”  with a .50 caliber  machine gun mounted on top.

Apparently, the militia concerned citizens are mostly past middle age [no!] white [really?!] men [shocked!!].  Women will be given the support roles and apparently, the five black members of the militia operation will be in charge of stepping and fetching [okay, i made that last one up].

The sad part is that things seem worse in Louisiana than they were 16+ years ago when I left.  But maybe I just hear the worst of it from here.  Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention to the social and political environment until after I left.  That last option has a lot of support: hell, I voted for Ross Perot in ’92

No real observation here, certainly nothing that’s statistically significant (let’s see you construct a double blind study of a man’s activities when his wife is a thousand miles away).  Just amusing myself really.  Next up… the amazing idiocy of George Bush photos captioned with “Miss me yet?”  But right now, it’s Ghetto Pop Life… go ahead, I’ll wait while you cue it up.

Er, actually, a better Festivus miracle is that today the senate democratic caucus reached the 60 votes needed for their final cloture vote and will vote on healthcare reform tomorrow.  FWIW, the vote could have been held today, but Vitter (R-LA) objected.  The bill also could have been held up until 8pm tomorrow, but republicans couldn’t quite bring themselves to wait that long to get out of town.  So instead, the vote (needing only 50 ayes plus Biden) will happen at 7am tomorrow morning.

A quick note on the bill.  Put me in the camp with folks who wanted something better, but regard the senate bill as a significant step forward.  Specifically, I would love to see something like a single payer system.  People seem pretty happy with Medicare (wasn’t a common teabagger cry: “keep the government out of my Medicare!”?), so gradually expanding Medicare eligibility to younger people, eventually allowing a person of any age to buy into Medicare seems like a good idea.   We would still need to fix the republican Medicare Part D prohibition on negotiation with drug companies, but that’s minor.

Failing single payer, what I really would like to see are controls on how hard the insurance companies can screw you (currently hard enough to make you want to scream “green balloons“), and then provide subsidies to allow more people to buy insurance.  Well, that’s what we got.  Sure, there’s a purchasing mandate – you must buy insurance, but that’s pretty reasonable.

So, it’s not a perfect bill, but it’s a good start and will help literally millions of people and will literally save tens of thousands of lives each year.  That’s a good first step.  There’s nothing that says that we can’t improve the bill over the next decade.  That’s what has happened with every other expansion of the social safety net for the past 60+ years, from social security to medicare.  There is no progressive rapture.  We won’t pass a bill and then be taken up to liberal heaven or achieve social nirvana.  There aren’t 72 hippie virgins waiting for us at the signing of any piece of legislation.  And neither mankind nor its societies are perfectible.  But both mankind and society is subject to continuous improvement.  We can make things better and this bill is another step in that process.

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If you look into the article, you find that insurgents are apparently using a $26 piece of software that let takes satellite data and saves parts of it that might not be intended for your computer.  Essentially, it monitors the data that is sent and when it sees a file transferred will save it to your hard drive, regardless of whether or not your computer was the intended destination.

Now, I’ve been doing computer security work for over a decade.  I was the first person at my university to implement anti-virus in email, I was the first to require a department to use all-encrypted communication for transmitting passwords.  I discovered one of the earliest IRC-based botnets.  I’ve found vulnerabilities in financial systems.  I’ve seen … [a]ttack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.  Er, wait, some of that last bit may have been someone else, but you get the idea.

This stuff isn’t that hard.  SSL is over 15 years old, we know how to do encryption.  Hell, back in the 90s when we were developing the Predator, the U.S. was treating encryption as a munition – you had to get the government’s blessing to use decent encryption.  Is it too much to ask that an actual weapon include the munition that was encryption?  And this from the WSJ article strikes me as BS:

Predator drones are built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of San Diego. Some of its communications technology is proprietary, so widely used encryption systems aren’t readily compatible, said people familiar with the matter.

In an email, a spokeswoman said that for security reasons, the company couldn’t comment on “specific data link capabilities and limitations.”

Or more  to the point, entirely irrelevant.  First, the communication system can’t be *that* proprietary, since the commercial (if somewhat sketchy) SkyGrabber software can read the transmissions.  Second, you developed a proprietary communication system in the mid to late 90s and didn’t include encryption?  That’s the sort of thing that makes the baby Bruce Schneier cry.

On the other hand, this from CNN seems far more likely:

A senior defense official who was not authorized to speak about the security breach said, “This was an old issue for us and it has been taken care of,” but he would not elaborate on what specifically had been taken care of.

The official said that many of the UAV feeds need to be sent out live to numerous people at one time, and encryption was found to slow the real-time link. The encryption therefore was removed from many feeds.

Removing the encryption, however, allowed outsiders with the correct tools to gain unauthorized access to these feeds.

I’ll buy that.   There are certainly a few encryption schemes that will send encrypted data to multiple parties, hell at the very least, you could use symmetric encryption with shared keys.  But that kinda sucks.  Most commercial communication encryption technology assumes point to point transfers.  If you wanted to send the same data to many people… you send it multiple times.

Regardless, this is just embarrassing.  These days I’m doing security modelling work and if this is the sort of thing that we’ll have to consider, I’m going to sink into a very deep depression.