perfidy

The anal-retentive types over here have taken the fine art and enjoyable pastime of criticizing movies for their departures from the known laws of physics to ridiculous lengths. I complain about movie physics sins during movies, after movies and sometimes even before movies if the trailer is bad enough. But I've got nothing on these guys, especially when they go after Armageddon and what they judge to be the worst physics movie ever, The Core.

Mike Hawash has indicated his regret for his actions in the past. He's received a seven year sentence, and I guess that seems about right. For those who don't remember, Hawash is the former Intel software engineer who was arrested a year or so ago for attempting to fight against US troops in Afghanistan. At the time, the tech community was somewhat up in arms because he'd been arrested without charge or explanation.

Some time passed, and then the FBI documents were made public. Reading them was pretty sobering. He hadn't just been arrested in a general sweep; there was very specific information about what he'd done wrong, how he'd gone about it, and so forth.

I think some of my incredulity at the time of his initial arrest was really due to the fact that he was a software guy. I just found it hard to believe that someone in my profession could do something so stupid. Clearly, though, he did.

Overlapping with that was the knowledge that various government agencies had engaged in a fair amount of abuse of process and flat out racism in detaining many other Arab citizens. I think this is one of the reasons that I feel so strongly about ensuring that individual rights are very carefully monitored and never abused...because when the government really needs to act in an extraordinary way, and be somewhat rough on a particular individual, we can't have any confusion about whether that person is being caught up in a general crackdown.

The FBI couldn't have done anything different in the Hawash case; they appear to have done everything by the book.

It's still strange to me, though. A guy who co-writes a book on DirectX programming, is a highly paid engineer, and is by all accounts a model suburban father, somehow morphs into a guy who's willing to fly to a strange country, pick up a gun, and shoot at US soldiers.

I take heart in the fact that there are tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of Muslim suburban fathers here who do not make the same choice, when torn between cultures. We stand with them; they are part of the American soul.

I feel sad for Mike Hawash and his family. He's paying a terrible and just price for his actions.

The New York Times has uncovered compelling evidence that NASA has been tampering with the color of photos beamed from Mars, and today published a shocking exposee of mechanical malfeasance , deliberate deception, and sloppy science.

[D]id NASA fiddle with the [color images from Mars] to make [them] look that red? As Mars buffs have pointed out in recent weeks on Web sites like Slashdot.org, a closer look reveals that parts of the rover itself, in the foreground, are oddly garish. Even the color chips placed on the rover to calibrate the color photographs had shifted. What should be bright blue is instead bright pink; what should be bright green is brown. . . .

What was going on? On Jan. 31, during a lull in the control room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jason Soderblom, a graduate student at Cornell who is a member of the science team, gave a talk explaining the odd Martian colors. . . .

[For the rover to] produce a color photograph, the rover's panoramic camera takes three black-and-white images of a scene, once with a red filter, once with a green filter and once with a blue filter. Each is then tinted with the color of the filter, and the three are combined into a color image.

In assembling the Spirit photographs, however, the scientists used an image taken with an infrared filter, not the red filter. Some blue pigments like the cobalt in the rover color chip also emit this longer-wavelength light, which is not visible to the human eye. . . .

For the scientists, there are good reasons to focus on infrared colors rather than the visible red. "Iron dominates mineral color in the visible, and it causes everything to have shades of red," Mr. Soderblom said.

With the infrared filter, the different iron minerals emit different colors, and the camera can better differentiate between them. "We're trying to identify the minerals in the scene, and the way we're doing this is with subtle differences," Mr. Soderblom said. . . .

Still, there was no reason for the Spirit to see pink on Mars. When producing the panorama, the camera also used the red filter.

"We just made a mistake," said Dr. James F. Bell III, the lead scientist for the camera. "It's really just a mess-up."

A mess-up? Or a cover-up? This administration will stop at nothing to obscure the truth, even blocking authenticity in the name of science. I tell you now, Magentagate will become the deciding factor in the 2004 Presidential elections.

What could they be hiding up there, New York Times? What, indeed? Better get on it.

Not the ass of the world, which is Steubenville, OH. (Nitro WV being a close runner-up.) But the bottom of the world, which is to say the South Pole.

Sophie got to take a day trip to the new base being constructed at the pole, and took time to get her picture took. For more information on the South Pole, you can start here. 

A recent comment has caused me to rethink my goals, values and position in life.

RegretsYou | 02/09/04 7:55 AM | Email:worthless@pos.org | IP 216.127.72.7

Please take your hateful, talentless, war-loving, trailer-trash family back to rural Ohio, where your kind belongs. Oh, that's right, they only have real jobs there, not shameful, government-waste, meaningless, busywork jobs like yours. And may God help your hapless son.

And you know, he's exactly right. It was, oddly enough, a kind of road to Damascus, scales falling from the eyes kind of experience. There I was, sitting in my flannel pajamas and checking the blog before getting ready for work, and bam! There it was! I don't belong here in this cosmopolitan DC milieu. My attempts to move beyond my heritage have failed utterly. I just can't get past my upbringing. So I called my dad, and told him. And we've decided to move the family back to Ohio. Advanced degrees and high paying jobs are just poor camouflage for our trailer trash roots.

Dad's thinking he's gonna buy a Ford F150, but then he always knew more about cars than I did. I'll just get something that'll look nice in front of a double wide. We'll fit in there, with our kind. We can get real jobs like pulling up concrete, or maybe even digging ditches. That would be the nes plus ultra of authentic, proletarian vocations, don't you think? And we could hang out in the local bars, and talk with the other xenophobic, jingoistic, back-country rubes. Although we'd have to be careful not to let it out that we went to college. Hicks don't take kindly to condescending, college educated folk telling them what's what.

It will be a relief to leave government contracting behind. It's been so frustrating trying to get government workers to adapt to commercial sector timetables. I can just relax and swing a 20lb sledge; and think about going home to my son, and how I'll teach him about the mendacity of the French, creationism, and how it's good for honest Americans to blow up the little brown people. Of course, I'll have to be careful not to overdo it. He might rebel and go to college! JC might pick all manner of noxious habits, and learn to hate everyone he knows. Of course, he's hapless – just like his talentless Dad and Granddad, so I won't have much to fear, I think.

I'll call the wife right now and tell her to start packing. And maybe God will help us along with a million dollar buyout.

RegretsYou, please leave your real email address in the comments, as I'd like to thank you personally for the insights you've given me and my family. I followed the ip address the blog software logged, but it only led here. You have nothing to fear! Talentless hacks can't afford lawyers.

It's time for my semi-regular, always belated and apologetic link to BTD's Sunday Comics feature. The crew over at Begging to Differ has had a recent lineup change - they've assimilated three new bloggers, but have also lost a regular, BTD Mike. I am happy and sad for them.

Scott Elliott, who maintains the Election Projection (which is interesting in its own right, and well worth a look) has come up with 21 reasons that Bush will be reelected in November.

Several of these are fairly compelling, and at the very least it's a good starting point for trying to put your own spin on how things will turn out.

I note with a little sadness that Uru Live is disappearing, before it was even born. The Myst series of games have always represented the high-water mark for graphics and visual adventure games. Uru Live was an interesting effort...an attempt to bring this kind of game into the online massive multiplayer online space.

The company spent a ton of money to build this thing. The results, visually, were pretty astonishing. Great conceptual art, excellent engine...a lot of good ingredients were there. The best moments in Uru were "vista moments", where you would come across some new area, and be simply blown away by the beauty or concept of the thing.

So what went wrong? More than anything, I think, the problem was the underlying thinking about the game that was being played. Why do we play games, or read books, or watch movies? To see things that are beautiful; to see "new" things. We can do it to learn, to interact...or to compete.

Uru never had any sense of competition. One could be built, but it did not yet exist. In fact, Uru didn't really seem to have much of a sense of gaming at all. Clever puzzles that required cooperation could have been designed, and weren't. That really left only exploration. Uru Live itself never delivered that, either...the official version never came to be.

It strikes me that the marketing of this thing was screwed up pretty badly...to get the "buzz" you need to get an MMORPG started, you need a good burst of players. The single player game was fine, but it followed the general sales pattern of every single player game: Big initial sales, then a steady decline. MMORPGs are all about maintaining the franchise. You have this initial burst of players, and you need to retain them.

Uru Live didn't exist, so there was nothing to keep player mind share.

What's more, it was painfully clear in the live "prologue" that whatever plans there were for the online component simply hadn't worked out. If Live was somewhere near a true release, vastly more of the game should have been working during the Christmas timeframe. It might not have been ready, but it should have been dramatically apparent where it was all going. It was not.

I'd conclude that management realized that the Live part just wasn't going to work, for many reasons. They decided to milk the cash they could out of the single player version, and so they have. This is a sensible thing to do. There seems to be a lot of content that's been prepared for Live; this will be released as expansion packs for the original game. Again, this makes financial sense. For purchasers of the game it makes sense too -- and is probably less expensive than a monthly fee in any case.

Bold experiments happen, and sometimes they don't work. I hope the team is proud of their successes. They've really raised the bar in some areas. Deeper planning in the actual social/online game component might have given the project legs.

Space.com reports that the memory surgery performed on the Mars Rover Spirit was a complete success. Spirit will now set about trundling through the Martian countryside, molesting rocks with its RAT and otherwise pestering the locals. (RAT: Rock Abrasion Tool)

You are all pretentious twats. Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky.

The Commissar drops a clue that perhaps James Joyce does not think highly of us.

Well, Mr. Joyce of Kuro5hin can kiss my ass. Even though this is a pMachine blog. I drink black coffee, and I no longer own a Mac. Well, I do, but I don't use it. It's a pre-PowerPC Quadra. Well, sometimes, I haul it out and play Escape Velocity. But I don't have an iMac. My Aunt does though! And she has an AOL account! I bet you hate her, too. But I digress. At least I'm not named after an opaque novelist no one reads.