Administration and Iraqi government close to drawdown deal

How the Olympics and Georgia are completely pushing this off the radar is beyond me, but the question of opposition to the war and the exact timing of the pullout might be a moot question by 2009: link

American soldiers will withdraw from cities across Iraq next summer and all US combat troops will leave the country within three years, provided the violence remains low, under the terms of a draft agreement with the Iraqi Government. In one of the most detailed insights yet into the content of the deal, Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, has also told The Times that the US military would be barred from unilaterally mounting attacks inside Iraq from next year. In addition, the power of arrest for US soldiers would be curbed by the need to hand over any detainee to a new, US-Iraqi committee. Troops would require the green light from this joint command before conducting any operation. The Pentagon refused to comment last night on the proposals laid out in the draft agreement between Baghdad and Washington that covers the status of US forces beyond 2008. Britain will strike its own deal with Iraq but Gor-don Brown hopes to withdraw most British troops from Iraq by next summer, reducing the number of soldiers from 4,100 to “a few hundred” by then. Mr Zebari said in an interview: “Our negotiators and the Americans have almost brought it [the accord] to a close. It is not a closed deal but it is very close.”

This is good news, as we could really spare the resources to invest into Afghanistan - a country with a long history of appearing conquered and then exploding. In terms of the 2008 elections, it seems as though with this issue potentially out of the way and the economy recovering, we might actually have a debate about the issues I am most interested in: the limits of executive power, the future of civil rights in this country, and technological innovation (green technology and telecommunications). Oh sure, McCain could call Obama's opposition to the surge a bad decision that would have prevented the current progress from taking place (though some analysis has suggested it had more to do with the earlier Sunni Awakening). And Obama could say that the decision to go to war at all was a bad idea built on a series of frauds. But I think Americans are more interested about the future rather than the past in this election. I am fairly worried a pullout from Iraq will still leave a heavily balkanized country, rather ripe for a civil war from a historical perspective. Dividing neighborhoods by religion/ethnicity and putting up large concrete barriers between them might limit violence in the short term, but it doesn't make for a very cohesive nation. I mean look at this:

Poor design

Sorry I haven't updated in a while, I have been busying myself with some reading and general related work. More and more I am putting myself into the position of a GIS developer rather than an operator - creating tools with ESRI's ArcObjects API. Whether this is "real" programming or not depends, I suppose, on your definition. I still consider myself something of a novice to the actual field of computer science, but I feel comfortable creating custom scripts and operator tools for ArcGIS in C#, Python, VB.NET, and T-SQL. I could say I am going to the trouble of learning all of this because it increases my earning potential, but it's actually a lot of fun. Computers are rather poor at what the human mind generally does - analysis and higher order modeling - and human minds simply cannot match the power of computers to instantly recall and organize memory (not to mention their potential for networking with the vast knowledge of the internet). Interfacing with a computer at progressively lower levels greatly increases the collaborative power that comes as a result of normal use, and it is a joy to be working in such a way.

The i9/11 and the iPATRIOT Act

Excellent, excellent talk on the future of the internet with some very smart people. Jonathan Zittrain: Author of "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It" (available free here). Lawrence Lessig: Lawyer and author of dozens of books about free culture, recently having switched from talking about copyright specifically to a more broad range of IT and government corruption issues. Vin Cerf: He basically invented the internet with two other guys. No, really. Currently he is Google's chief internet evangelical (that is his real job title). The whole video is good, but the thing that stands out the most is a comment made by Lessig - the PATRIOT Act wasn't written really quickly in the wake of 9/11, it was sitting in a desk drawer waiting for the opportunity to be passed by a frantic legislature. He asked Richard Clarke, former chief counterterrorism advisor to numerous presidents, if a version of the PATRIOT Act for the internet was waiting for some kind of major internet-based attack which could be compared to 9/11 in terms of disruption and financial loss. Clarke said that, without question, there was. The heart of the problem is our national infrastructure is based on a system that our representatives are largely entirely ignorant of. Here is Senator Ted Stevens demonstrating such ignorance. Here is John McCain admitted to not knowing how to use a computer, much less the internet. None of this would be a problem, except these are the kind of people that can (at least attempt) to legislate internet activity in the country. And when some major incident occurs, which is inevitable due to the open nature of the internet, they may kill the largest and most important communication/content/distribution instrument ever conceived by humankind.

Taking a picture of an image without using light that interacted with it.

When you look at something - any object - your eyes are reading information from all of the light reflected off that object. A leaf appears green because it absorbs or scatters all other kinds of light.

Light actually consists of individual particles called photons. An odd thing about particles - if you "entangle" one particle with another, they still are effected by one another over great distances. Change the spin of one, and the other one reacts. It doesn't seem to make too much sense, but that is quantum physics.

So what happens if you could capture the information of light particles that are hitting an object, but you only have contact with their entangled friend? Turns out you can make an image out of it anyway. The information is, I am told, only useful if you get the other one back too, but it is still pretty nifty. Below is an image of a toy soldier they viewed by this indirect method:



This will be sort of a big deal, as in the future, it might allow for the ability to see through all sorts of things. I know is seems strange, since we only see a cloudless Google Earth whenever we want, but satellites still need clear days for good imagery. This might be another way of mitigating those pesky clouds.