zenpundit.com

Freedom (TM) by Daniel Suarez

Remember those augmented reality glasses that the daemon operatives like Loki used to connect to the Darknet? Well, DARPA did…

DARPA Designing Augmented Reality Goggles to Fight Friendly Fire 
 

Remember how the Beastmaster could see through the eyes of his pet eagle? DARPA does. And it’s pursuing augmented reality goggles tech that’ll let troops see through the eyes of a nearby unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in order to more accurately target its weapons.

The issue of accurate targeting and weapons-fire has a renewed interest in the wake of NATO mistakenly destroying rebel armor in Libya rather than Gadhaffi’s hardware, but it’s never been an easy task. One of the very best ways to deliver today’s smartest weapons is to have an “eyes-on” soldier in the field near the target relaying real time data up to the aircraft that’s about to drop a bomb–but this situation is not often practical or desirable and can be dangerous for both the soldier and the incoming aircraft.

Read the rest here. 

Very cool. If John was not so busy with his new company, he probably could tell his readers how to combine this off-the-shelf modified tech with DIY drones.

An always fun thought experiment is to figure out how far ahead DARPA really is in the lab compared to whatever toy they feel comfortable giving a press release. And then there’s what exists on the drawing board that is technically feasible but not particularly economical at the present time to pursue seriously. Imagination usually far outstrips budgets

[ by Charles Cameron ]

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Some people’s — and more to the point, some peoples’ — living memory appears to be longer than others. China, for instance, has what you might call long term living memory.

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But first, the Crusades. When Bush 43 first used the word “crusade” in reference to the US response to 9/11, I went to Google and checked, and the first listing for “crusade against” that came up was to The Crusade Against Dental Amalgam. I’m the suspicious type, and as I suspected, the word “crusade” simply doesn’t have the same valence for most twenty-first century Americans that it has for many in the twenty-first century Arab world. In the US, a crusade is a concerted effort to change just about anything, the use of mercury in dental fillings being just one example.

Across the Arab world, however, the word has very different connotations: thus Amin Maalouf writes in The Crusades through Arab Eyes:

The Turk Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to shoot the pope on 13 May 1981, had expressed himself in a letter in these terms: I have decided to kill John Paul II, supreme commander of the Crusades. Beyond this individual act, it seems clear that the Arab East still sees the West as a natural enemy. Against that enemy, any hostile action — be it political, military, or based on oil — is considered no more than legitimate vengeance. And there can be no doubt that the schism between the two worlds dates from the Crusades, deeply felt by the Arabs, even today, as an act of rape.

That’s long term living memory for you.

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I’m writing this because I just read a fascinating article by Robert Barnett on the New York Review of Books blog titled The Dalai Lama’s ‘Deception’: Why a Seventeenth-Century Decree Matters to Beijing — need I say more?

The title will suffice for those who don’t have much time today — I understand, we’re all under the fire-hose one way or another — while those with the ability to sneak in ten or fifteen minutes laterally while the clock’s not watching can and should definitely read the whole thing…

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I have just one side-observation though — the article tells us, among many other things directly relating to Tibet and the history of the Dalai Lamas:

And again, when Jiang Zemin made a brutal decision to annihilate the basically harmless Falungong cult in 1999, it is believed that he saw it as analogous to the religious movement that had started the Taiping Rebellion and nearly toppled the Qing in the mid-19th century.

I think that’s right — but what Barnett doesn’t mention, since Taiping is only an aside for him, is that the rebellion was only eventually quelled at the cost of between twenty and thirty million lives…

I mentioned my own hunch that memories of Taiping were behind the Chinese government’s fierce response to Falun Gong in question time after Ali A Allawi‘s talk on Mahdist movements in Iraq at the Jamestown Foundation a few years back, and he responded that similarly, the reason the Iraqi government took such fierce action against a small Mahdist uprising near Najaf — even calling in US air support as I recall, for an incident perhaps best compared in US terms with Waco — was that they remembered the Babi movement in their own neck of the woods, and the tens of thousands who died back in the 1850s, around the same time as the Taiping in China.

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Living memory — which could almost be a definition of history, or at least of what historical research aims to create — can itself be long term or short, perishable or perennial.

And then there’s Psalm 90, which declares “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.”

Now (and I’m being playful here, albeit with a touch of serious intent) does that suggest a Memory that reaches back in perfect detail through the eons to the Big Bang and perhaps before it? Or … “twentieth century? nineteenth? the Crusades?.. it’s all a bit of a blur, I’m afraid — it all rushes by so fast…”

*

There seems to be a choice set before us as individuals — and more to the point, as peoples:

Shall we choose Lethe, and the restfulness of oblivion, or Mnemosyne — the mother of all Muses? There are, you know, immediate educational implications, and serious geopolitical implications down the road, for the choice we make…

[ by Charles Cameron ]

*

Yesterday, I stumbled on the account of pole dancing for Jesus with the accompanying graphic. I was a little taken aback, I’ll admit, but Jesus didn’t confine his ministry to the pious and scholarly, he befriended women of questionable morals and enforcers from the Roman mob as I recall, or “publicans and sinners” to give them slightly more pleasant names – so I sat up, took notice, downloaded the image, and re-sized it to fit in the top position of one of my DoubleQuotes – while wondering if I’d have to wait till Doomsday to find a suitable companion piece.

All in a day’s screen-gazing, I wound up watching the Wong Kar-Wai film, Fallen Angels, last night, and lo: the screen-shot in the lower part of the DoubleQuote revealed itself.

There are interesting paradoxes embedded in each image, of course, pitting what you might call “deep” theology against pious expectation – but they also illustrate another matter of some interest to me, the degree to which religion is now richly integrated into popular culture.

*

My second DoubleQuote, which contains today’s haul, deals with the same theme, I suppose — this time showing how what used to be the separate realms of science fiction and religion are now intermingled, with Minister Farrakhan speaking of an “end times” space craft that is an integral part of NoI eschatology in his annual Saviours’ Day speech, while alien aircraft flown by religious robots feature in a tongue-in-cheek news report about the war over Libya from Spencer Ackerman at the Wired War Room.

It is perhaps not surprising that Minister Farrakhan also cites Scientology with approval in the same speech, nor that that religion was itself the offspring of science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard. We are in a fertile period for the religious imagination, I believe, grappling to find new ways to answer the age-old questions — and science fiction and “signs in the skies” are among the vehicles, along with new religious movements and old religions renewed, by which we are coming to terms with life in this post-nuclear age…

I’m not much of a prophet, but I predict that the confluence of science fiction with religion will prove to be one of the keys to an understanding of our times…

[ by Charles Cameron ]

*

My son, Emlyn, turns sixteen today.

He’s not terribly fond of computers to be honest — but he does follow xkcd with appreciation, as do I from time to time: indeed, I am led to believe I receive some credit for that fact.

So… this is a birthday greeting to Emlyn, among other things. And a round of applause for Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd. And a post comparing more reliable and less reliable statistics, because that’s a singularly important issue — the more reliable ones in this/ case coming from a single individual with an expert friend, the less reliable ones coming from a huge corporation celebrated for its intelligence and creativity… and with a hat-tip to Cheryl Rofer of the Phronesisaical blog.

The DoubleQuote:

Radiation exposure:

Today, xkcd surpassed itself / his Randallself / ourselves, with a graphic showing different levels of radiation exposure from sleeping next to someone (0.05 muSv, represented by one tiny blue square top left) or eating a banana (twice as dangerous, but only a tenth as nice) up through the levels (all the blue squares combined equal three of the tiny green ones, all the green squares combined equal 7.5 of the little brown ones, and the largest patch of brown (8Sv) is the level where immediate treatment doesn’t stand a chance of saving your life)…

The unit is Sieverts, Sv: 1000 muSv = 1 mSv, 1000 mSv= 1 Sv, sleeping next to someone is an acceptable risk at 0.05 muSv, a mammogram (3 mSv) delivers a little over 50,000 times that level of risk and saves countless lives, 250 mSv is the dose limit for emergency workers in life-saving ops — oh, and cell phone use is risk-free, zero muSv, radiation-wise, although dangerous when driving. [I apologize for needing to write “mu” when I intend the Greek letter by that name, btw — software glitch with the ZP version of WordPress.]

The xkcd diagram comes with this disclaimer:

There’s a lot of discussion of radiation from the Fukushima plants, along with comparisons to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Radiation levels are often described as “ times the normal level” or “% over the legal limit,” which can be pretty confusing.

Ellen, a friend of mine who’s a student at Reed and Senior Reactor Operator at the Reed Research Reactor, has been spending the last few days answering questions about radiation dosage virtually nonstop (I’ve actually seen her interrupt them with “brb, reactor”). She suggested a chart might help put different amounts of radiation into perspective, and so with her help, I put one together. She also made one of her own; it has fewer colors, but contains more information about what radiation exposure consists of and how it affects the body.

I’m not an expert in radiation and I’m sure I’ve got a lot of mistakes in here, but there’s so much wild misinformation out there that I figured a broad comparison of different types of dosages might be good anyway. I don’t include too much about the Fukushima reactor because the situation seems to be changing by the hour, but I hope the chart provides some helpful context.

Blog-friend Cheryl Rofer, whose work has included remediation of uranium tailings at the Sillamäe site in Estonia (she co-edited the book on it, Turning a Problem Into a Resource: Remediation and Waste Management at the Sillamäe Site, Estonia) links to xkcd’s effort at the top of her post The Latest on Fukushima and Some Great Web Resources and tells us it “seems both accurate and capable of giving some sense of the relative exposures that are relevant to understanding the issues at Fukushima” — contrast her comments on a recent New York Times graphic:

In other radiation news, the New York Times may have maxed out on the potential for causing radiation hysteria. They’ve got a graphic that shows everybody dead within a mile from the Fukushima plant. As I noted yesterday, you need dose rate and time to calculate an exposure. The Times didn’t bother with that second little detail.

In any case, many thanks, Cheryl — WTF, NYT? — and WTG, xkcd!

Google:

Once again, xkcd nails it.

I’ve run into this problem myself, trying to use Google to gauge the relative frequencies of words or phrases that interest me — things like moshiach + soon vs “second coming” + soon vs mahdi + soon, you know the kinds of things that I’m curious about, I forget the specific examples where it finally dawned on me how utterly useless Google’s “About XYZ,000 results (0.21 seconds)” rankings really are — but the word needs to get out.

Feh!

Paging Edward Tufte.

Sixteen today:

Happy Birthday, Emlyn!

a light-hearted canon in two voices

[ by Charles Cameron ]

*

I’d been doing some research for a follow-up post on story-telling in Afghanistan to go with Scott‘s account of his day at DARPA’s recent STORyNET conference, and one of the interlocutors on the list we’re both on posted a question about the impact of drug use as a consideration in narrative.

Baudelaire and Cocteau both have writings on drug use — hashish and opium respectively — but it was Afghan or more generally Islamic story-telling that I was after, and it occurred to me that the four stories in Paul Bowles‘ collection, A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard, were easily accessible examples of the kind of story-telling that Moroccans are prone to under the influence of hashish.  Bowles describes their mental processes thus:

Moroccan kif-smokers like to speak of the “two worlds,” the one ruled by inexorable natural laws, and the other, the kif world, in which each person perceives “reality” according to the projections of his own essence, the state of consciousness in which the elements of the physical universe are automatically rearranged by cannabis to suit the requirements of the individual. These distorted variations in themselves generally are of scant interest to anyone but the subject at the time he is experiencing them. An intelligent smoker, nevertheless, can aid in directing the process of deformation in such a way that the results will have value to him in his daily life. If he has faith in the accuracy of his interpretations, he will accept them as decisive, and use them to determine a subsequent plan of action. Thus, for a dedicated smoker, the passage to the “other world” is often a pilgrimage undertaken for the express purpose of oracular consultation.

The title of Bowles’ little collection, by the way, comes from the Moroccan proverb which is gives me the first of my two quotes, two courtyards, two intoxicants and two hundred camels below…

I wasn’t entirely satisfied, though, which a Moroccan account of hash-flavored narrative when DARPA was looking for an understanding of narrative that would apply in Afghanistan, so I thought I’d look up some of Idries Shah‘s writings, and Kara Kush in particular, to see if perhaps I could find an Afghan equivalent of Bowles’ stories there…

I already had Bowles’ one courtyard and one hundred camels in mind, so you’ll understand how pleased I was to stumble upon another slightly obscure but interesting writer — Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey, who gave use the concept of the TAZ or Temporary Autonomous Zone — writing about Afghanistan rather than Morocco, opium rather than hashish, and a second courtyard, with a second hundred camels:

Two terrific writers: Paul Bowles and Peter Lamborn Wilson.

Sources: Bowles – Wilson

Courtyards with a hundred camels in them are popping up all over.