taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Greetings from sunny Dublin, Ireland! (really!)

I’m now back in taint.org’s native timezone, although precariously set up and experiencing occasional interruptions. If you’re waiting for a mail from me, it may take a little more time.

I did have time to be interviewed last week by Karlin Lillington for this Guardian story:

To make sure customs agents could read his cat’s chip to match him to his Pet Passport on return to Europe, Mason bought his own scanner at a cost of some £200. “I didn’t want to risk the cat being impounded for six months’ quarantine at Heathrow,” he sighs.

It’s true.

Happy to be back — I think. Looking forward to my first pints, in over a year, of creamy Guinness in its native habitat. I also have a couple of half-written weblog entries I wrote on the plane, too…

Tags: bubba, cat, dublin, guardian, guinness, home, meta, rfid, travel

A great Guardian ‘Bad Science’ column by Ben Goldacre, Don’t dumb me down. An excellent article on how mainstream journalists fail miserably in their attempts to report science stories accurately, and how this fundamentally misrepresents science to society at large.

Being a geek (of the computing persuasion) who hangs out with other geeks (of various science persuasions), I would up discussing this problem myself a month or two ago. This paragraph sums up where I think the failure lies:

There is one university PR department in London that I know fairly well - it’s a small middle-class world after all - and I know that until recently, they had never employed a single science graduate. This is not uncommon. Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely - since they’ll be the ones interested in reading the stuff - people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it’s edited by a whole team of people who don’t understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given “science communication” chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they’ve got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.

I’d throw in the extra step of a paper in Nature. Apart from that, in my opinion, he’s spot on.

Other disciplines don’t have this problem:

Because papers think you won’t understand the “science bit”, all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them - that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word “biophoton” on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.

Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn’t about something being true or not true: that’s a humanities graduate parody. It’s about the error bar, statistical significance, it’s about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it’s about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence.

Tags: guardian, news-media, newspapers, reporting, science

News: Newseum: Today’s Front Pages (Flash map view). A great site;
the best thing about it is, a double-click on each newspaper’s ‘dot’ will pop up their front page as a larger image in a new window, and give you a URL for a full-page PDF file.

Best of all, those full-page PDF links update every day with that day’s front page… for example, these are eminently bookmarkable:

• The Guardian (PDF)
• Irish Independent (PDF)

Excellent!

A bit like The Guardian’s Digital Edition, but a whole lot cheaper and simpler.

Tags: day, flash, front, guardian, map, news, newseum, page, pages, pdf, today

Language: So, here’s a word worth noting — ‘Neverendum’. This Guardian article notes:

(Quebecois politician Mario Dumont’s) meteoric ascent is a sign of how weary voters in the French-speaking province have become about what has been dubbed the ‘neverendum referendum’, the debate over whether Quebec should become a country. It has dominated Quebec politics for three decades.

It looks like Ireland’s ever-recurring referenda (motto: ‘if at first the Government fails to get their desired result, try, try again’) have driven the word into usage over there too, judging by this Irish Family Planning Association press release:

‘The idea of holding another pro-life neverendum is clearly ludicrous and serves only to distract from the daily reality of Irish Abortion.’

And there’s even a song, referring to the Nice referendum:

‘The Government should not patronise us but should respect the views of the people,’ he said. Or, as he puts it in verse, ‘What part of our No don?t they understand?’

Tags: article, ascent, government, guardian, irish, language, neverendum, politician, quebecois, referendum, word

Spam: Guardian: Incredible Bulk, by Danny O’Brien. A great article from the
‘Spam and the Law’ conference. ‘This is why people such as Richter are appearing from the shadows. They have a choice: turn legit, or risk an increasingly criminal lifestyle.’

Also spam-related: Code Fish Spam Watch, which lists and dissects phishing attacks, in great detail. Some of those trojans are exceptionally sophisticated – such as this trojan targetting Barclays online banking, which actually takes screenshots of a CAPTCHA-style login protocol. Scary!

Tags: article, bulk, choice, conference, guardian, incredible, law, richter, spam, the

Funny: The Guardian’s got a new agony aunt — Buck up! Ann Widdecombe’s no-nonsense solutions to life’s knotty problems.

My husband left his wife and child for me eight months ago. I have two children, younger than his, from a previous relationship. Despite what I feel was a very reasonable divorce settlement, my husband still spends as much on his first child as he did before, and still gives his ex-wife additional money whenever she asks for it. It all amounts to easily as much as he spends on us, his new family. I think we should be his first priority now, especially as his ex-wife is a professional woman and has ample funds for everything she and her child might need. He wouldn’t be depriving them of anything. Am I right? (Name and address withheld)

(Ann’s response — best read in a shrill schoolmarmish tone…)

He should have stayed with his wife as he vowed to do when he married her. You should have married and stayed with the father of your kids. Then you wouldn’t be in this silly mess, where the only victims are the children. Goodnight.

Also, overheard: ‘(European companies) employing US-based contractors these days is a shrewd business move due to the strength of the Euro – America is like the India of Europe.’

Tags: agony, aunt, child, divorce, ex-wife, funny, guardian, husband, life, relationship, wife

Bizarre: Given some historical context, it’s funny how absolutely insane this sounds: Guardian: At Home with the Fuhrer.

My discovery was an article headlined ‘Hitler’s Mountain Home’ - a breathless, three-page Hello!-style tour around Haus Wachenfeld, Hitler’s chalet in the Bavarian Alps. In it, the author, the improbably named Ignatius Phayre, tells us that ‘it is over 12 years since Herr Hitler fixed on the site of his one and only home. It had to be close to the Austrian border’. It was originally little more than a shed, but he was able to develop it ‘as his famous book Mein Kampf became a bestseller of astonishing power’.

The great dictator, it seems, was quite the interiors wizard: ‘The colour scheme throughout this bright, airy chalet is light jade green. The Führer is his own decorator, designer and furnisher, as well as architect… has a passion about cut flowers in his home.’

And he is seldom alone in his mountain hideaway, as he ‘delights in the society of brilliant foreigners, especially painters, musicians and singers. As host, he is a droll raconteur… ‘

Oh, and look who’s practising his archery in the garden: ‘It is strange to watch the burly Field-Marshal Göering, as chief of the most formidable airforce in Europe, taking a turn with the bow-and-arrow at straw targets of 25 yards range.’

And on it gushes, all accompanied by various photos of Hitler and friends admiring the view, examining plans for the house, and one delightful shot of Adolf relaxing on a deckchair with ‘one of his pedigree alsatians beside him’.

Next time you read an over-excited ‘inside the home of’ article, bear in mind that the subject might be a psychopathic dictator bent on world domination and mass murder.

(The article then descends into a convoluted mess of copyright claims and counterclaims, BTW, in case you’re interested. But the bizarre stuff is what got me ;)

Tags: article, bizarre, chalet, context, dictator, discovery, fuhrer, guardian, hitler, home, mountain

Japan: The Guardian: Melbourne row over art ‘porn’:

‘Police in Australia have investigated pornography claims against an art gallery which exhibited a painting drawn from a 19th-century woodcut by the Japanese artist Hokusai.

The painting, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, is by an Australian, David Laity, and is valued at £5,400. It is being shown in a Melbourne gallery. Like the 1814 original, it depicts a woman copulating with an octopus.

Katsushika Hokusai was an influential Japanese painter and woodcut designer in the 18th and 19th centuries — more info and pictures here. (There’s a great exhibition of his work on at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin right now, which is where I caught it.)

He coined the term ‘Manga’ to describe a collection of sketches. Who knew he also came up with the totally bizarre ‘tentacle porn’ subgenre of anime?

Tags: art, gallery, guardian, hokusai, japan, painting, police, porn, pornography, row, woodcut

The Guardian: Melbourne row over art ‘porn’:

‘Police in Australia have investigated pornography claims against an art gallery which exhibited a painting drawn from a 19th-century woodcut by the Japanese artist Hokusai.

The painting, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, is by an Australian, David Laity, and is valued at £5,400. It is being shown in a Melbourne gallery. Like the 1814 original, it depicts a woman copulating with an octopus.

Katsushika Hokusai was an influential Japanese painter and woodcut designer in the 18th and 19th centuries — more info and pictures here. (There’s a great exhibition of his work on at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin right now, which is where I caught it.)

He coined the term ‘Manga’ to describe a collection of sketches. Who knew he also came up with the totally bizarre ‘tentacle porn’ subgenre of anime?

Tags: art, gallery, guardian, hokusai, painting, police, porn, pornography, row, woodcut

Humour: Guardian Talk: The Barefoot Doctor, live online. This is the funniest thing I’ve read in months — thanks Tom!

(Background: ‘The Barefoot Doctor’ is the ‘healer’ who writes for The Observer Magazine on ‘wellbeing, alternative therapies and medicines and ways to cope with modern life’. Everything can apparently be healed through kidney massage and a few essential oils.)

Q: A case study, Mr Barefoot: my bus has crashed - I’ve got a compound fracture in my right leg, the bone is sticking out from under the skin and is wedged into the ‘Used Tickets’ receptacle, my skull has had a good old thump against the seat in front and is impersonating a boiled egg after the first thump with the teaspoon, and my ribs have been broken into bits like a packet of smokey bacon crisps someone has stood on.

What herbs and aromatic oils would you recommend?

Doc: you may jest - however, aromatic oils or potions can be extremely effective in speeding the healing process eg - manuka honey,lavender, marigold etc - thanks for bringing it up

Q: oooh good answer. yes i’m going out to buy some manuka honey right away. what do you do with it, is it nice on toast?

lavender, marigolds? is he opening a kitchen department?

Q: My unfortunate friend received a quite severe beating in the street a few days ago and has since been passing blood in his urine, in copius amounts.

Can recomend any effective massage oils for my friend? Its quite urgent because he’s beginning to talk incoherently about bright lights, can’t move and fainting.

Thank you, 3000

(… snip several hundred similar hilariously bitchy ‘questions’… Barefoot Doctor disappears for a while…)

Q: Where is he? Maybe the Barefoot Cab Driver who learnt to drive by karmic chanting has driven into a tree — or can’t find first gear?

(BTW the real ‘barefoot doctors’ were a different kettle of fish entirely; ‘part-peasant, part-doctor’ commune-level health workers in revolutionary China.)

Tags: doctor, friend, guardian, honey, humour, lavender, manuka, massage, talk, the, thump

Guardian Talk: The Barefoot Doctor, live online. This is the funniest thing I’ve read in months — thanks Tom!

(Background: ‘The Barefoot Doctor’ is the ‘healer’ who writes for The Observer Magazine on ‘wellbeing, alternative therapies and medicines and ways to cope with modern life’. Everything can apparently be healed through kidney massage and a few essential oils.)

Q: A case study, Mr Barefoot: my bus has crashed - I’ve got a compound fracture in my right leg, the bone is sticking out from under the skin and is wedged into the ‘Used Tickets’ receptacle, my skull has had a good old thump against the seat in front and is impersonating a boiled egg after the first thump with the teaspoon, and my ribs have been broken into bits like a packet of smokey bacon crisps someone has stood on.

What herbs and aromatic oils would you recommend?

Doc: you may jest - however, aromatic oils or potions can be extremely effective in speeding the healing process eg - manuka honey,lavender, marigold etc - thanks for bringing it up

Q: oooh good answer. yes i’m going out to buy some manuka honey right away. what do you do with it, is it nice on toast?

lavender, marigolds? is he opening a kitchen department?

Q: My unfortunate friend received a quite severe beating in the street a few days ago and has since been passing blood in his urine, in copius amounts.

Can recomend any effective massage oils for my friend? Its quite urgent because he’s beginning to talk incoherently about bright lights, can’t move and fainting.

Thank you, 3000

(… snip several hundred similar hilariously bitchy ‘questions’… Barefoot Doctor disappears for a while…)

Q: Where is he? Maybe the Barefoot Cab Driver who learnt to drive by karmic chanting has driven into a tree — or can’t find first gear?

(BTW the real ‘barefoot doctors’ were a different kettle of fish entirely; ‘part-peasant, part-doctor’ commune-level health workers in revolutionary China.)

Tags: doctor, friend, guardian, honey, lavender, manuka, massage, talk, the, thump

Guardian: Now which way back to the car?: ‘From Exmoor to the Yorkshire Dales and the Scottish borders, naked ramblers are being spotted up and down the country. What’s going on?’

Tags: car, country, dales, exmoor, guardian, scottish, way, yorkshire

The Guardian reports that fake-news genius Chris Morris is collaborating on a new show with Charlie Brooker:

This has led to persistent rumours on internet talkboards and gossip sites that the show will be based around TVGoHome’s character Nathan Barley.

Barley, the star of a fictional TVGoHome docusoap, is a loathsome public school educated, Hoxton-dwelling new media type, obsessed with gadgets and extreme sports.

But given Morris’s fondness for windups and spoofs, this could just as easily be a red herring.

Apparently, Morris and Brooker have collaborated before on smaller segments. Whatever it is, I’m all for it. Fact times Importance equals News!

Gross: The Indian ‘fly boy’ has doctors baffled. ‘Doctors carried out a cystoscopy to clear the boy’s urinary tract, but the treatment has failed because two more flies emerged out of his penis on Monday.’ (aaargh)

Tags: boy, character, docusoap, genius, gossip, guardian, internet, show, star, tvgohome

The RID-Spam Act chugs through Congress. This one’s very much toothless; according to CAUCE, it’s not actually anti-spam really — CAUCE says:

(it is) ‘a gross misnomer to call them ‘anti-spam.’ ‘Anti-consumer,’ sure. ‘Pro-spam,’ even. But not ‘anti-spam.”

Amazingly, DMcC notes that it may even de-fang the stronger state laws if it gets passed. Wow.

And check out this quote from the CNet story:

Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., defended the bill’s opt-out approach. Goodlatte said that of the physical junk mail he gets, ‘maybe 10 percent of it is something that I have some interest in. For that reason alone I think an opt-out approach is the best solution here.’

Good for him. The way he’s talking there, he’s looking forward to receiving 700,000 mails per year that ‘he has some interest in’. Earth calling Goodlatte — direct email is not the same as physical junk mail. There’s a fundamental economic difference — with email, the recipient pays. That means you cannot compare the volumes so simplistically. Just say no to One Bite Of The Apple!

US Politics: Rod notes this story: The Guardian coming to the US. Excellent! I think that’s a fantastic idea, and they’ll clean up.

Consider this — the only large-circulation print media that (a) people over here read, and (b) had the nerve to really treat the war in Iraq critically, as far as I know, are those two flaming-red anarchosyndicalist rags, the Economist and the Financial Times. (Not only are they not even written in the US, they’re quite conservative by Euro standards.) The US media needs more liberal voices.

Actually, I’m exagerrating heavily here. As Craig has pointed out before, the Christian Science Monitor is a pretty good paper, with some critical journalism — and one with a great story behind it’s provenance to boot.

But the Guardian has a pretty much wide open field all the same — here’s hoping they can get the distribution side sorted out.

E-Voting: Some good comments on this Slashdot story regarding e-voting systems.

• The Brazilian legislature mandated a retrofit ‘of 3% (some 12,000 machines) to produce a paper ballot that the voter could peruse and deposit in a box for recount (the first large-scale use of the ‘Mercuri Method’).’

• Georgia noted that the e-voting systems ‘were all very flashy and glitzy, but all had severe problems with security and/or usability. We eventually decided to run a pilot program in last year’s off-year election and try out 5 of the most promising machines in a real-world election. The final winner will be used across the state in 2004. No more hanging chad, but I think we are going to have a whole new set of problems to deal with.’

Tags: act, approach, cauce, email, guardian, interest, junk, mail, rid-spam, story

Arlene McCarthy is the MEP proposing to amend the operations of the European patent office, and permit software patents in Europe.

Last week, the Guardian printed this story by Nick Hill and rms setting out the free software position on why software patents should be avoided.

Now, McCarthy’s response:

We have an obligation to legislate not just for one section of the software industry who seeks to impose its business model on the rest of industry, which moreover is not ‘free’, but is actually a different form of monopoly by imposing a copyright licence system on users.

No comment…

Tags: guardian, industry, mep, office, patent, position, response, software, story, week

Lost from the Baghdad museum: truth (Guardian). hmmm! It seems we’ve been had:

(In April, it was widely reported that) 100,000-plus priceless items were looted (from the Baghdad museum) either under the very noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves. And the only problem with it is that it’s nonsense. It isn’t true. It’s made up. It’s bollocks.

Incredible — it seems (a) the museum was looted — to a degree; the vast majority of ‘missing’ items had actually been moved into safe storage, and ‘most of the serious looting was an inside job’.

And (b) the academics and journalists who reported ‘170,000 items … stolen or destroyed’ had been led by the nose by Dr Donny George, the museum’s director of research. It just wasn’t true:

Over the past six weeks it has gradually become clear that most of the objects which had been on display in the museum galleries were removed before the war. Some of the most valuable went into bank vaults, where they were discovered last week. Eight thousand more have been found in 179 boxes hidden ‘in a secret vault’. And several of the larger and most remarked items seem to have been spirited away long before the Americans arrived in Baghdad.

George is now quoted as saying that that items lost could represent ‘a small percentage’ of the collection and blamed shoddy reporting for the exaggeration. ‘There was a mistake,’ he said. ‘Someone asked us what is the number of pieces in the whole collection. We said over 170,000, and they took that as the number lost. Reporters came in and saw empty shelves and reached the conclusion that all was gone. But before the war we evacuated all of the small pieces and emptied the showcases except for fragile or heavy material that was difficult to move.’

This indictment of world journalism has caused some surprise to those who listened to George and others speak at the British Museum meeting. One art historian, Dr Tom Flynn, now speaks of his ‘great bewilderment’. ‘Donny George himself had ample opportunity to clarify to the best of (his) knowledge the extent of the looting and the likely number of missing objects,’ says Flynn. ‘Is it not a little strange that quite so many journalists went away with the wrong impression, while Mr George made little or not attempt to clarify the context of the figure of 170,000 which he repeated with such regularity and gusto before, during, and after that meeting.’ To Flynn it is also odd that George didn’t seem to know that pieces had been taken into hiding or evacuated. ‘There is a queasy subtext here if you bother to seek it out,’ he suggests.

Tags: april, collection, guardian, hmmm, museum, number, problem, truth, war, yanks

Goodbye to Baghdad (Guardian). Some good snippets:

The information ministry and TV headquarters were obvious targets (for looters), but the wanton destruction of St George’s church was unexpected. … A man living next door to the church said Christians were seen as part of the regime.

Tariq Aziz, after all, is a Christian. Also, this — I knew it! –

The US tanks that shot their way into the city have lost their menace. Children now go right up to the US soldiers, smile, and swear at them in Arabic, finding it hilarious that the troops think they are being friendly.

And the politics of the Shia/Sunni divide:

‘The whole administration has been robbed and destroyed, except for those institutions which have been guarded by them (provisional Shia local government),’ said the hospital director. He was transparently unhappy at having to take orders from the Shia clergy, but said America had left him no choice.

‘Without them, this hospital would have vanished. We have no civilian administration now. Until now America hasn’t done anything for the civilian administration. They are just occupying us and doing nothing.’

The doctor’s dilemma raises a larger question. Did Bush go to war on Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship to pave the way for an Islamist Shia regime bordering Iran? Because that is what is beginning to take root in Saddam City, and in other neighbourhoods of Baghdad. ….

The new Shia assertiveness - whether through ambitions of religious government or the exuberance with which millions this week participated in a religious pilgrimage banned under Saddam - has horrified the Iraqi middle and upper classes, and the minority Sunni elite, which has been the traditional ruler of Iraq from the days of the Ottoman empire.

Like the Americans, they have been slow to react these past two weeks, stunned by the speed with which the regime collapsed and mortified by the knowledge that millions have watched on TV as Iraqis laid waste to their own country, and history.

Tags: administration, church, goodbye, government, guardian, hospital, regime, shia, sunni, way

Guardian: Ministers may be questioned over cover-up.

The cover-up into security force collusion with loyalist murder gangs in Northern Ireland may have reached the highest echelons of the army and even government ministers, Britain’s most senior police officer revealed yesterday. …

He said loyalist paramilitaries had been helped by RUC officers and members of a covert army squad, the FRU (force research unit), and that the cooperation between them included ‘wilful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, and the extreme of agents being involved in murder’.

Tags: army, collusion, cover-up, force, government, guardian, loyalist, ministers, murder, security

Joe Haslam (hi Joe!) mailed about Aeronautics.RU, wondering if it’s a fake. I’m pretty sure not, and John Sutherland at The Guardian concurs, noting that it was big in the City of London:

You don’t factor news into your model, but intelligence. There is a surfeit of war news, but reliable intelligence is hard to come by. The canny (stock market) trader in these parlous days has a first port of call - GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye), the espionage arm of the Russian military.

GRU is the most sophisticated agency of its kind in the world. And, since Glasnost, the most transparent. GRU has thousands of agents worldwide (especially in countries such as Iraq, where Russia has traditional trade links). Intelligence has always been a top priority for Ivan. The number of agents operated by the GRU during the Soviet era was six times the number of agents operated by the KGB.

Russia, superpower that it was, still has spy satellites, state-of-the-art interception technology and (unlike the CIA) men on the ground. The beauty of GRU is that it does not (like the CIA) report directly to the leadership but to the Russian ministry of defence. In its wisdom, it makes its analyses publicly available. These are digested as daily bulletins on www.iraqwar.ru.

… and syndicated onto Aeronautics.RU as well. Sadly, since the Russians closed up their Baghdad embassy and got out of Iraq, just in time it seems, all the reports have dried up. Ah well.

The reporting was incredibly detailed, and modulo a big chip on their shoulder about US imperialism, pretty informative.

Joe also points to another Aeronautics.RU article, ‘how military communications are intercepted’. Venik, the author, notes that the US is using SINCGARS ‘frequency-hopping’ radios, which use a daily-broadcast shared secret as an initial vector for the algorithm which determines what frequencies to ‘hop’ through, throughout the day.

However, security afforded by frequency-hopping methods is very dependant on the strict adherence to protocols for operating such radios. The US troops and other operators of frequency-hopping radio sets frequently disregard these protocols. An example would be an artillery unit passing digital traffic in the frequency-hopping mode, which would enable an unauthorized listener to determine the frequency-hopping algorithm and eavesdrop on the transmission. (jm: sounds like a known-plaintext attack; similar attacks were used by the Allies on German use of Enigma during WWII.)

Even when proper protocols for using frequency-hopping radios are being adhered to interception and decryption of these signals is still possible. The frequency-hopping interceptors are special advanced reconnaissance wideband receivers capable of simultaneously tracking a large number of frequency-hopping encrypted transmissions even in high background noise environments.

It then details some seriously specialized equipment for breaking frequency-hopping radio transmissions, which can ‘process the complete 30 to 80 MHz ground-to-ground VHF band within a 2.5 ms time slot’.

So judging by all of that, the chances of finding one of those ‘FH-1 frequency-hopping interceptors’, ‘manufactured by VIDEOTON-MECHLABOR Manufacturing and Development Ltd of Hungary’, sitting in the Russian embassy in Iraq about 2 weeks ago, would have been pretty high I’d bet. ;)

He doesn’t detail why encryption the system uses, or how that is supposedly being broken. But I don’t doubt it was, personally. Given the ‘artillery unit’ hole noted above, there were probably quite a few ways to get hold of the day’s key, given enough time and thought; and from what I’ve read, it can only be very tricky to use good crypto, and keep it secure, in a battlefield environment. And those Russians have had plenty of time to think about US military systems after all. ;)

Tags: aeronautics, cia, city, fake, gru, guardian, intelligence, model, news, number

With SARS terrorizing Hong Kong, the slogan the HK Tourist Board chose for their ads in such mags as Cosmopolitan and Conde Nast Traveller seems pretty unfortunate — Hong Kong will take your breath away. oops! (the Guardian)

Tags: board, breath, conde, cosmopolitan, guardian, nast, sars, slogan, tourist, traveller

The Guardian notes the latest bizarre phraseology to emerge from the White House — Calibrate me, Dick:

From Donald Rumsfeld - the man who brought you known unknowns and unknown unknowns - comes a phrase so disorienting in its weirdness that even seasoned Rumsfeldologists have been taken aback by its increasingly frequent use at Pentagon briefings. Uttered one way, it sounds combative like Dirty Harry; uttered another, camp like Austin Powers.

In fact, it appears to be just a hi-tech, precision-guided version of ‘correct me if I’m wrong’, the Dick in question being General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Worryingly, ‘Calibrate me’ is also the name of a song by the scary indie rock group Atombombpocketknife: could Rumsfeld be a fan?

Typical recent usage: ‘The Republican Guard has - calibrate me, Dick - they pulled south in the north and they went north in the southern portion of the country.’

Context in which it almost certainly did not occur, circa 2002: ‘Calibrate me, Dick, but I really don’t think we’re going to need all that much heavy infantry to take Baghdad, are we?’

Tags: calibrate, guardian, house, man, pentagon, phrase, phraseology, rumsfeldologists, use, white

Mark Lawson in today’s Guardian:

This time, digital satellite viewers can even use their red interactive buttons to call the shots of the shots: zapping between battle zones and international capitals like a James Bond baddie watching the world come down on 30 TV screens in his underground bunker… We belong to a generation which has largely ceased to be surprised by television, but think about this: those who wanted to were able to watch an enemy operation live from the banks of the Tigris. This weekend’s pictures have widened the eyes like nothing since the moon landings, though with rather greater moral complications. The essential problem is that in seeming to know everything, we know nothing. There are wise old journalists who will tell you that the word ‘raw’ is usually a warning. It is unwise to eat raw meat or smell raw sewage and it may be equally foolish to consume raw news coverage.

Forwarded by Tim Chapman on the forteana list.

Kind of irrelevant to me, seeing as I’m now based in the US, and the concept of unbiased, unfiltered TV news doesn’t really seem to exist over here.

Instead, the war coverage consists of an endless array of human interest stories with the troops and whizz-bang explosion footage. There’s absolutely no interpretation, apart from what it might imply for relatives of the US servicemen involved — that’s it. As far as I can see, there is no real liberal news, or a balancing viewpoint, on TV over here.

In about 3 hours of news on TV, I think I saw one opposing viewpoint, 5 minutes with ex-senator George McGovern. That was it.

I’m finding this to be a serious culture shock. Thankfully, I’ve got the web to read and listen to the European stuff instead, so I’m doing that instead. The old Barlow line about the internet and censorship springs to mind…

Tags: baddie, battle, coverage, guardian, news, nothing, satellite, time, today, viewpoint

Humour:Guardian: The joke’s on Saddam: In northern Iraq, they’re laughing at Saddam Hussein. Luke Harding meets two comedians who have dared to cock a snook at the ruthless dictator - and annoyed him so much that he ordered their assassination.

The film was screened on Kurdish television; and after decades of official repression, it was a huge hit. Saddam’s vigilant agents dispatched a CD copy to Baghdad. The Iraqi president was not amused. His response, when it came, was predictable: he sent several assassins to northern Iraq to kill the entire cast. ‘Fortunately the guys were all arrested (by the Kurdish authorities),’ Hassan recalls. ‘They were found carrying a list. All our names were on it.’

Tags: assassination, cock, dictator, guardian, humour, hussein, joke, kurdish, saddam, snook

Steppe by Step (Guardian). “I started wondering if (the ’six degrees of separation’ theory) was true today. … So 35 years on from the original experiment, I decided to test out the urban myth on a world stage: how many steps would it really take to get to someone on the other side of the planet?”

The London-based “city girl” author, Lucy Leveugle, makes it in 9 steps (hey, the world has expanded!) to Purev-Ochir Gungaa, a nomadic herdsman in the middle of the steppes of Outer Mongolia. Amazing.

Tags: experiment, guardian, myth, separation, step, steppe, the, theory, today, world

Guardian: DrugScope, the drug charity, says that an ‘intensive media campaign against the drug ecstasy has led to an increase in cocaine use among young people’. whoops.

‘Studies show the reason they no longer use ecstasy is because of the scare stories,’ said a spokesman for the charity. ‘They haven’t seen similar stories about cocaine and their belief is that cocaine is the safer drug. The reality is that cocaine, especially crack cocaine, is a much more harmful drug - it kills more people each year and more people have dependency on it.’

They also add a few UL-busting facts:

DrugScope’s guide argues that there are no recorded examples of heroin ever being cut with ground glass … no drug is instantly addictive and that addiction generally takes several months to develop … physical withdrawal from heroin is like a bad bout of flu, not a near-death experience.

Tags: campaign, charity, cocaine, drug, drugscope, ecstasy, guardian, heroin, increase, use

Guardian: Courage under fire. No matter what you think about what’s going on in Israel and Palestine, Caoimhe, and the other international observers, require your support:

Friday was a very close call. Caoimhe was shot in the left thigh as she stood in between a firing IDF tank and three young boys in the street. I spoke to her on the phone shortly after the attack as she lay in her hospital bed. She explained that she had been trying to persuade the IDF, after they shot dead a nine-year-old boy, to stop shooting at the children. They had told her to get out of their way or they would shoot her. It was while she was clearing the children off the streets that she was shot. She is sure she was a direct target; the tank was close by, the soldier pointed his gun at her and fired, and continued to do so as she crawled to an alleyway for shelter.

I asked an IDF spokesman for his explanation. ‘We are in the middle of a war and we cannot be responsible for the safety of anyone who has not been coordinated by the IDF to be in the occupied territories right now. While we do not want innocent Palestinians to suffer, or internationals to get hurt, we are trying to ensure the safety of the Israelis and we will not tolerate internationals interfering with IDF operations. It is not the job of internationals to stand in the line of fire, unless they are the son of God, but he hasn’t come yet.’

Tags: caoimhe, courage, fire, friday, guardian, idf, matter, safety, support, tank

The Guardian: Word of the week: “basically”:

“Perhaps you are one of those strong individuals who manages to resist the use of meaningless adverbs, but others will have recognised, guiltily, one of their own favourite words appearing as a verbal tic in a widely broadcast statement this week. On Friday, “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, accused of attempting to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami, introduced a slice of South London syntax into the Boston court where he is being tried. Questioned by the judge about his intentions, he declared: “Basically, I got on to the plane with a bomb. Basically, I tried to ignite it. Basically, yeah, I intended to damage the plane.” …

Tags: broadcast, favourite, friday, guardian, plane, shoe, statement, use, week, word

Bringing the net to Eden (Guardian). “In the village of Kirkby Stephen, in the Eden Valley, on the border between Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales, getting on to the internet is a major effort. With phone lines shared between remote farmhouses, and mobile phones a cruel fantasy, an internet connection here can drop as low as 12Kbps (…) But all of this is about to change. EdenFaster, a local community organisation, is about to supply broadband internet connections to the entire valley, bringing 10,000 people, 500 businesses and 50 schools online with an internet connection 20 times faster than ADSL for half the price. They’re doing it on their own because of a perceived lack of demand by telecoms companies. They’re doing it wirelessly, and they’re one of the leaders in the new revolution in ways to deliver the internet in the UK.”

Tags: border, bringing, connection, dales, effort, guardian, internet, net, village, yorkshire

Good article at the Guardian, on what J. R. R. Tolkien would have made of the movie:

Why, he would have asked in despair, has his quintessentially English shire been turned into an outstation of Riverdance? “I do know Celtic things and feel for them a certain distaste. They are in fact ‘mad’,” he wrote in an untypically snotty letter in 1937. So why do the hobbits do Irish jigs at Bilbo Baggins’ birthday party?

Why are two of the hobbits in the fellowship, Merry and Pippin, cast as prat-falling Irish clowns? Why does Howard Shore’s music break into repeated Irish warbling? Because, as he would dolefully have guessed, James Cameron’s Titanic proved that dollops of Irishry play well with the US box office.

Well, I think I’ll be with JRR on that one then. begorrah.

Tags: article, celtic, despair, distaste, english, guardian, movie, outstation, riverdance, shire

Nancy Banks-Smith on an ill-conceived method of reviewing, during her career as the Guardian’s TV critic:

Later, we all went to the BBC’s TV centre or various ITV offices, running after each other across town like a row of ducks. Then, programmes were shown in central viewing theatres such as at Bafta. This had the disadvantage that the actors were apt to show up, too, applauding their own performance. It was not a relaxed mix. It was at Bafta that Barbara Woodhouse snapped “Put that out at once!” with such dominance that the critic beside me swallowed her cigarette and had to be extinguished with water.

Tags: bafta, banks, bbc, career, centre, critic, guardian, method, nancy, smith

I’ve been very quiet about the attack on the World Trade Center; this is not from any unwillingness to talk about it, it’s more because, for the last week, I’ve been doing virtually nothing else, in a range of forums, particularly on Crackmice and the TBTF Irregulars list. What can I say — I guess I’m just not a committed blogger ;)

Anyway, I’ve been forwarding on lots of details on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda organisation, which generally makes it look like the US and its allies will have their work cut out for them. Here’s a good one from The Guardian (UK):

Communications are vital. Messages are sent by word of mouth to Pakistan, and from there they are emailed. Bin Laden, testimony has shown, had no contact with any of the east African bombers except for al’Owhali, whom he met, once, 18 months before the attack. Instead the men were selected, briefed and supervised by senior aides, some from organisations affiliated with but discrete from bin Laden’s. And this is the key: al-Qaeda does not act as a commander, it acts as a facilitator, a coordinator, putting together disparate elements - some in Afghanistan, some in the target country, some in other locations entirely - who together can pull off an operation.

It’s going to be messy. And as a much-forwarded piece by Tamim Ansary points out,

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

There’s lots more good, insightful journalism in the Guardian’s special report on Afghanistan and special report on the WTC attacks. Recommended reading.

Tags: attack, bin, care, center, done, guardian, laden, report, trade, world