Hey, Anil has made it to the top of the nigritude ultramarine pile. A little late for the iPod Mini, but, take that SEOs! Anil’s wrapup.

• BBC: Is the world’s oil running out fast?
• Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn’t Bind Bush – interesting discussion
  

  The NYT articles says Ashcroft stated that “Bush ‘made no order that would require or direct the violation’ of either international treaties or domestic laws prohibiting torture.” However, POTUS’s lawyers say that torturing prisoners is not a violation of such laws. So, Ashcroft didn’t really say that Bush did not order torture.

• Bush to the US Constitution: Drop Dead
• Reflections on Witty: Analyzing the Attacker
• JavaScript: The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language
• Tom’s notes from NotCon
• Monolith – way cool, by the ever-prolific Jason Rohrer
  

  Things get interesting when you apply Monolith to copyrighted files. For example, munging two copyrighted files will produce a completely new file that, in most cases, contains no information from either file. In other words, the resulting Mono file is not “owned” by the original copyright holders (if owned at all, it would be owned by the person who did the munging). Given that the Mono file can be combined with either of the original, copyrighted files to reconstruct the other copyrighted file, this lack of Mono ownership may be seem hard to believe.

  Consider this simple fact: for a given Element file and any other file of the same length (call it fileA), it is possible to choose a Basis file that, when munged with the Element, will produce fileA as the resulting Mono file. Therefore, if a copyright holder claims that she owns the information in all Mono files that are munged from her work, she is also claiming copyright over all possible binary files that are the same length as her work. For example, suppose that fileA is an MP3 of a Beatles song, and the Element file is an MP3 of a Britney Spears song copyrighted by Jive Records. It is possible to find a Basis file that, when munged with the Spears song, will produce the Beatles song as the Mono file. Jive Records certainly cannot claim copyright over the Beatles song (which is copyrighted by Apple Records), nor can they claim copyright over any other Mono files munged from MP3s of their songs.

  (every type of digital file is an arbitrary encoding however; it’s a mind-twister)

• Excerpts From “War Against War!” – fighting propaganda
• Eclipse RegEx Tester
• The Irresponsible Investor
  

  Of the roughly $19 trillion in American investment capital, in other words, $17 trillion or so is invested with the implicit instruction: ”Just give me back as much money as possible. Gouge consumers, cheat employees, poison the environment, lie to the public markets — just do it all sufficiently artfully that it doesn’t dent my portfolio.” Then, when the market falls and one of the people on the receiving end of their beastly demands is caught behaving badly, investors collapse to the floor in disbelief and bay for their money back. It is at that moment — and not a minute before — that they discover the novel idea that businessmen in possession of other people’s capital should be held to the highest ethical standards.

Unwinding after a very long night (and before I start working again), so I’m reading the 2000 Texas Republican Party Platform. Note, this is not a good way to unwind, unless you are a wing-nut religious psycho who hates the Constitution. Actually, there’s a lot that I can agree with in here, but enough sheer lunacy to make you cringe (realizing these people are in power). Some highlights:

• The Party calls for the United States monetary system to be returned to the gold standard. [hmm, still undecided on how nutty this is]
• We believe the environment is best served by individuals working in their own best interest. [Oh, wow. This has apparently worked wonders in Texas]
• the Clinton-Gore administration’s concept of “sustainable development” [yes, Bush’s policy of “unsustainable regression” looks like it’s been much more successful; thanks for the largest deficit evar!]
• Opposes: the theory of global warming and the Kyoto Agreement [ahh blissful ignorance of reality will make it all better]
• Opposes: Senate ratification of the Biodiversity Treaty and any its subsets of international authority over United States’ resources
• Opposes: the Endangered Species Act as currently authorized and its implementation as a land use control document
• Opposes: the Wildlands Project, Border 21, the World Heritage Treaty, and the United Nations BioReserve program
• Opposes: the vast acquisition of Texas land by conservancy groups and government agencies, which potentially reduces the local tax base
• Opposes: EPA management of Texas. air quality issues [they’ve been doing such a great job themselves]
• We urge the immediate passage by the Texas Legislature the “Defense of Marriage Act”, which would deny recognition by Texas of homosexual “unions” legitimized by other states or nations.
• Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God… [as opposed to changing truths ordained by God, like womens rights and eating shrimp]
• We oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values. [discriminate away!]
• The Party believes, as do the vast majority of Texans, that pornography is repulsive, addictive and contributes to deviant criminal behavior. [you hear that? you are eeeeeviil]
• We support a state constitutional amendment that prohibits state or federal regulations imposed on private schools. [discriminate away!]
• We call for the abolition of the U. S. Department of Education and the prohibition of the transfer of any of its functions to any other federal agency.
• Re: Classroom Discipline: Corporal punishment should be used when appropriate and we encourage the legislature to strengthen existing immunity laws, respecting corporal punishment.
• We support a character education curriculum and a program based upon biblical principles upon which our nation and state law system were founded. [and here I thought we were children of the Enlightenment]
• We support individual teachers. right to teach creation science in Texas public schools. […and on the 8th day God created the Remington bolt action rifle to hunt the dinosaurs… and the homo-sexuals]
• The Party supports amendment of the Americans with Disabilities Act to exclude from its definition those persons with infectious diseases, substance addiction, learning disabilities, and behavior disorders…
• The Party calls upon Texas legislators to prohibit reproductive health care services or counseling in or through the public schools.
• We support the parents. right to choose which vaccines are administered to their minor children.
• Re: Homeless/Poverty: The Party encourages private groups to use their own creativity and initiative to explore private alternatives to government assistance.
• Re: Social Security: The Party supports an orderly transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts
• We support fundamental tax reform, including such measure as cutting individual tax rates, the elimination of the marriage penalty tax and the death (inheritance) tax, and elimination of capital gains and corporate income taxes.
• The Party calls on our Texas legislators to resist any efforts to make Worker.s Compensation mandatory for all Texas employers.
• The Party believes the minimum wage law should be repealed.
• (4) support the technological development of environmentally safe uses of coal for our national energy needs. [this is… stupendous]
• The Party continues to encourage and support… …2) the immediate funding and development of the Strategic Defense Initiative … 4) the abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
• The Party believes it is in the best interest of the citizens of the United States that we immediately rescind our membership in, as well as all financial and military contributions to, the United Nations.
• We support re-establishing United States control over the [Panama] Canal…

(Note, there’s a lot of Christianity talk scattered about this thing as well, but honestly now, have they read the Consititution? No mention of Jesus or God anywhere in there. Have they read the Bill of Rights?)

That being said, it would be nice if Bush/DeLay and folks would have actually put their money where there mouth was in fiscal responsibility, the balanced budget, waste and fraud in gov’t contracts, unfunded mandates. Oh yeah, and “the election of a conservative Republican president who supports the constitution and the sovereignty of the United States.” Hah, boy did they get that one wrong.

According to the EIA, America consumed 20.0MMBD last year, with 45% of it, 8.9 MMBD in gasoline alone. According to the latest EPA reports, average car and trck fuel efficiency is at 20.8mpg (check out the trends, it’s gone down since peaking in the late 80’s thanks to SUVs).

A VW Lupo gets between 78-99mpg running on diesel or bio-diesel (its Polo TDI cousin avg’s about 70mpg. (hybrid technology might add a couple more percentage points, but I’d have to do more research). Today manufacturers could easily meet increasing CAFE standards simply by doing simple things tweaking rolling resistance and aerodynamics.

Now think about it. Today, gas in Los Angeles is about $2.40/gallon. If you were driving a car today that avg’d 20mpg, and switched to one that got 60mpg, you’re effective cost/gallon would drop to $0.80/gallon – I don’t think I can even remember when gas was that cheap. Now, lets say that all the people switching to more efficient vehicles (or just driving less) had a 25% impact on gasoline consumption, or a 11.5% impact on overall oil demand. Would that lower actual prices (bringing effective prices down even more?)

(If you’re driving w/ a new direct injection diesel, prices are already a bit cheaper at the pump [albeit for crap diesel], or you can make your own bio-diesel for about $0.50/gallon. (before factoring in the cost/mi argument used above).)

Of course, if you actually run the totals through the spreadsheet, as an individual, if you’re driving 10-15K/yr, you’re only going to save a couple thousand bucks… I’ll need to do some more calculations/thinking on this later.

• Crash Testing: MINI Cooper vs Ford F150

• [rl] simpsons .torrents – every single Simpsons episode in DivX/XviD (I wateched the season finale – man, things have gone downhill)
• Born to Plog
  

  Hello! It looks like I am receiving a host of new visitors, thanks to a link on Amazon’s new Plog page. A Plog, as near as I can tell, is a “personalized log,” and is like a “blog” except you can’t personalize it. Also, instead of you writing it and other people reading it, robots write it and you read it. Also, instead of being open to the world, only you can see it. But aside from that, it’s pretty much nothing like a blog.

Didn’t hear about the gipper shuffling off this mortal coil until this evening, when I stepped out. I was born in 1980; Ronald Reagan was President for practically my entire early childhood. It’s sort of weird when they start dropping off like that. Honestly, I haven’t really given it as much thought as I should perhaps, worth writing about sometime in the future, perhaps.

Of the commentary I’ve read, WolfDaddy’s reminiscence struck me the most:

Reagan and the 80s and AIDS are inseparable to me. The optimism he brought to a country disillusioned made me feel very hopeful as a young teenager when he first took office.

By the time he left said office I had changed, as had the gay world around me that I so had recently entered. After being forsaken by family and childhood friends, I had already lost about 25 close, new, friends to diseases far worse and far stranger than Alzheimer’s, and would lose close to 100 more by 1994. No one cared. The optimism was still there in the general public; it wasn’t meant for people like me. All we could see was horrible deaths and irrational fear, and worse, utter apathy from many of the people we looked up to in our youth.

That’s Reagan’s legacy, to me. His inaction and silence, his failure as a leader, led to great suffering, great death. I yet cannot imagine anyone gleefully celebrating the man’s own suffering in the last ten years of his life. To do so is to forget–or possibly to have never learned–the consequences of the decisions made during Reagan’s time.

• Thermochemical Biomass Energy Conversion
• More on Oil…. – Kevin Drum has been writing about energy as well; some good (contrarian) messages in ensuing discussion (thoughts on vehicle problem, consumption, heavy oil).
• THE COMING ENERGY CRUNCH
  

  Americans’ relationship to energy underlies and ties together most of today’s headlines.gas prices, Middle Eastern terrorism and war, the environment, suburban sprawl, traffic-clogged roadways, the obesity epidemic. Talking about changing the way that we think about and use energy would give Kerry an entry point into discussing just about every hot-button issue in American life today.

• Wind in Their Ales – choose your power supplier in NYC
• The Tofte Project – on sustainable living (very nice design)
• Jerome has been writing about Oil lately as well
• Widescale Biodiesel Production from Algae
• Catching the green wave Investment in environmental technology gaining momentum

The more I look at Confluence, the more I like it. It has just about everything I want in a knowledge management tool (except the source code is $4,000).

It has ‘spaces‘ to subdivide data, profiles and groups, blogs (although only against spaces right now), comments, macros (uses Radeox) and, this is interesting, the ability to create ad-hoc heirarchies and to (this is great) create input templates (!!! yes, this is great!).

Things that would be nice: data type filtering, better delineation/customization of dashboard, taking the next step and allowing arbitrary relationship creation for pages, also subdividing nodes

• The state of Wiki APIs
• Radeox and ASL 2.0
• Tiki Wiki Usability
• TimTam – The Crunchy, Chocolate Coated, Java GUI Editor for Confluence
• Relational Model Considered Harmful

In a slightly related note, I noticed that Brandeis’ IT site is running entirely on Twiki.

• The Semantic Bliki
• FlexWiki as a blog engine
• Confluence – commercial J2EE wiki km tool
• Cardboard – PHP based bliki, Roadmap

Oh, since I wrote this reply for /., here’s my defense of wind power:

An interesting analysis, and while I agree w/ that nuclear power would be far preferable to coal, (and without discussing further viability issues), I would just like to point out that wind power in the US should not be ruled out offhand. From the abstract of the 1993 Wind Energy Potential in the United States study by D.L. Elliott and M.N. Schwartz (which supercedes the 1991 study cited):

Good wind areas, which cover 6% of the contiguous U.S. land area, have the potential to supply more than one and a half times the current electricity consumption of the United States. Technology under development today will be capable of producing electricity economically from good wind sites in many regions of the country.

So yes, in theory, wind power could meet our power needs (but not w/o being coupled with advanced battery technologies.

Even cost per kWh, Wind does ok. From a March 2004 briefing published by the World Nuclear Association on The Economics of Nuclear Power, shows a present day cost of about 3.7c/kWh. A recent AWEA analysis of the The Economics of Wind Energy [PDF] places the cost/kWh for a 51MW wind farm at between 2.6-4.8c/kWh depending on wind speed. Even if we account for backup power and double the cost, we’re not doing too badly either way.

Coal is at about 3.3c/kWh, but when calculating in the external costs “to put plausible financial figures against damage resulting from different forms of electricity production for the entire EU” as done in the decade long EC ExternE studies. Total cost [after adding the additional external costs] of both nuclear (+0.4 euro cents/kWh) and wind (+0.1-0.2 ec/kWh) end up beating the snot over coal (+4.1-7.3 ec/kWh).

Regardless, I agree with Lovelock. We really need to dump fossil fuels now.

BTW, as far as batteries go, Argonne Labs has been developing some advanced energy storage techniques includeing using high temperature superconductors for both magnetic as well as magnetic bearing flywheel storage (20kWh containment w/ 99% conversion efficiency and 0.1%/day idle loss); fuel cells / other electro-chemical storage would be options as well.