The Leviathan & The System Administrator

This is a tale of the present and the future, where nation states fall into two basic categories: A) The politically stable, technologically developed, globalized, economically interconnected states – the Core, and B) the politically unstable, underdeveloped or even non-developed, non-globally connected states – the Gap. Who cares?, you might ask. Well, as Thomas Barnett writes in Esquire Magazine:

If we draw a line around the majority of [US] military interventions, we have basically mapped the Non-Integrating Gap. Obviously, there are outliers excluded geographically by this simple approach, such as an Israel isolated in the Gap, a North Korea adrift within the Core, or a Philippines straddling the line. But looking at the data, it is hard to deny the essential logic of the picture: If a country is either losing out to globalization or rejecting much of the content flows associated with its advance, there is a far greater chance that the U.S. will end up sending forces at some point. Conversely, if a country is largely functioning within globalization, we tend not to have to send our forces ambienbuy there to restore order to eradicate threats.

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Utility Software: Too Many Features, Not Enough Utility

MS Word is to text editing what AOL is to email. Both systems have proprietary features that make life a little easier for inexperienced users while causing problems for everyone else. For example, in MS Word-formatted blog posts, Web links of the “a href=” type fail to work if the URL in enclosed in MS “curly quotes.” And I’m sure many of us have had frustrating experiences trying to send non-text attachments to AOL users.

Part of the problem in both cases is user error, and part is that MS and AOL use proprietary features to corral users. A lot of it also seems to be a lack of sense on the part of the software designers.

This is particularly true for Microsoft products. Word is complex, with default settings that are optimized to produce aesthetically perfect printed output. But much of what we do now is online, displaying text on Web pages via non-MS software such as Movable Type, and collaborating with people who aren’t always using Microsoft products. For such purposes the default use of plain text with a minimum of nonstandard ASCII characters makes more sense than does Word’s infinite configurability and default print orientation.

Brilliant Stuff (Happy Memorial Day)

No irony. Really brilliant.

This widely linked post is funny, but very insightful. It accurately shows the crippling problems our military faces.

This article from Army Magazine, entitled Sun Tzu’s Bad Advice: Urban Warfare in the Information Age, contains radical ideas about what we must do to overcome the same set of problems.

This post by the always superb Wretchard at Belmont Club, ties the two together.

It is good to see some people are thinking hard instead of just saying (1) give up or (2) somebody (France, the media, Kerry, Kofi Annan, whoever) won’t let us win.

An organism that can’t adapt to its environment dies. Nostalgia for the old environment just puts off the day of painful adaptation, perhaps fatally. That is not going to happen to us. We are going to adapt and survive.

One of the great strengths America has in this war is that we have totally open discussion, including off the wall thinking. Off the wall situations require off the wall thinking. This situation we face – Suicidal maniacs from a failed civilization want to murder us all, and most people don’t believe it is really happening – sounds like something out of a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. But it is real.

We Americans are pragmatists. One of our greatest enemies, Rommel, said the Americans knew less but learned faster than any enemy he ever faced. He also said the Americans had an admirable lack of respect for anything other than what worked. God willing we’ll always be like that.

Pray for clear thinking, and bravely facing the truth, and hard-nosed leadership.

Happy Memorial Day. God bless America.

The Last Great Observatory: Spitzer

C-SPAN has a briefing on the Spitzer Space Telescope, previously known as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF). Spitzer is the last of of NASA’s Great Observatories, the first and most famous of which is the Hubble Space Telescope.

Spitzer has all the markings of a revolutionary science instrument. Like Hubble, Spitzer is a space-based instrument. This, critically, raises the telescope above the dense, distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere. But unlike Hubble – which views the cosmos in the optical wavelengths – Spitzer peers into the infrared, the wavelength of heat.

Why is this important? Two reasons: interstellar gas and dust. Many of the most important regions of study in our galaxy – the star and planet forming nebulae – are composed of gas and dust, the very materials from which the stars and planets condense and form. We could see these regions, we just couldn’t see *into* them. That is, until Spitzer. The gas and dust are cool, while the recently formed stars and proto-planets are quite hot. In the infrared, they shine like fireflies on a summer night. A sort of x-ray vision, if you will.

The initial observations are providing unprecendented views into these star forming regions. Long held theories and models about the time scales and mechanisms of star and planet formation are already being called into question.

Looks like NASA and the folks at Lockheed Martin, who designed and built Spitzer, have hit a home run.

Spitzer Multimedia Gallery
Be sure to watch SIRTF Flash Overview (Cool Cosmos). It’s a beautiful presentation.

Sarbanes-Oxley

I probably shouldn’t even be writing about this, since it forms a large part of my income, but the National Review had a fine article on Sarbanes-Oxley. This was the law passed after the Enron and WorldCom scandals and the wreck of Arthur Andersen.

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