The BBC News site has a fascinating short article on an aspect of the Cuban Missle Crisis of 1965 that I was totally unaware of.

It seems that in addition to the long-range missiles the Soviets were trying to ship in, there were already 100 tactical nuclear weapons there that the U.S. intelligence agencies missed.

Castro wanted to keep them and it took some effort for the Soviets to convince him to return them and do it without the Americans finding out.

Good stuff.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19930260

It's time to get rid of the Electoral College.

Based on the results of state vs. national polls, it's looking increasingly likely that Obama may lose the national popular vote but win in the EC. As a nakedly partisan Democrat, would I be pleased with this outcome? Well, I'd be happier about it than I was when Bush lost the popular vote but managed to finagle an EC win, obviously ... but "happier" does not equate in this case to "happy" by any means. Because having someone against whom the majority of Americans vote become (or remain) President should simply never, ever happen.

The EC hasn't served its ostensible purpose, to protect the interests of smaller states against domination by larger ones, for generations, if ever. All it does is focus an unwarranted amount of attention on a few "swing states" every four years, with the effect that the interests of the residents of states that don't fall into this category get no representation at all at the Presidential level. If you live in Texas or California, you might as well not vote at all in the Presidential election; same if you live in Wyoming or Vermont. And that really sucks.

Even "swing states" don't really matter all that much, most of the time, if they're sparsely populated. New Mexico was just as close in 2000 as Florida was, but nobody cared how it went, because whoever got Florida was going to get the White House. (Gore won NM by some incredibly narrow margin; if you'd forgotten that detail, I don't blame you.) What was that about small states, again? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Get rid of the damned thing. This isn't partisanship. It's an acknowledgement of reality.

In regards to the issues currently happening in Egypt and Libya, the problem is intolerance. The proper response to Mr. Bacile and his movie is to ignore it and his childish attempt at attention grabbing. If pressed, criticize it as bigoted, amateurish and hateful. Disagree with it to your heart's content. But to commit violence of any level over the impotent ramblings of a buffoon? Absolutely unacceptable.

Freedom of speech means nothing if it cannot be used to criticize and lampoon those in power -- whether they be people, icons, symbols or beliefs. Freedom of speech that is limited to saying only the bland and inconsequential, never arousing passion or challenging authority is no freedom at all.

There is no such thing as a right to not be offended.

I just finished submitting revisions on The Paper. Not, you understand, revisions in response to reviewers' comments--we haven't received those yet--but rather revisions made necessary by my discovery, well after submission, of a bug in the code. Fortunately it didn't substantially affect the main results or the conclusions, but it did require revising some of the numbers.

I've never had to do anything like this before, and sincerely hope I never do again. It was a stupid bug, the kind of mistake that anyone can make coding at 2:00 AM on too much caffeine and way too little sleep, and I should damn well have caught it before sending out a paper which will pretty much define my research career to date.

But I'm glad it's done. Because while everyone makes mistakes, and indeed those mistakes are part of the process of science, you have to be honest about them. If you're not honest, then what you're doing isn't science, it's something else (say, politics or religion). There is no capital-T Truth in science, but there is truth, and we must always tell that truth as best we can.

While it has long been known that the ocean contains, in aggregate, large amounts of valuable minerals dissolved in it, extracting them has been expensive and difficult.

Attempts to extract minerals using ion exchange started shortly after World War 2. In the 2002, Japanese researchers at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute advanced a method using flexible plastic fibers braided into mats and impregnated with an absorbent chemical. The costs involved are around $1,200 per kg using this method, as opposed to the approximate $120 per kg from traditional mines.

Recently researchers at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have more than doubled the amount of uranium that can be extracted from seawater using refinements on the Japanese method. They've successfully brought the costs down to about $660 per kg.

Why all the effort? The world's oceans contain around 4.5 billion tons of uranium, enough fuel to power every nuclear plant on the planet for 6,500 years.

Why was this study not released before I fathered my four kids!

http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/08/10/study-oral-sex-cures-morning-sickness/

But here's the thing. When I was born, my father was working for NASA on the Apollo program. You know, "the Eagle has landed", "one small step," all that. He was one of the (many, many) people who made that happen. He was there, as "there" as it's possible to be without feeling Lunar soil under one's own boots.

When we moved to Denver a couple of years later, he worked for what was then Martin Marietta, on the Viking project among other things. IIRC, he also worked on the early design process for the Shuttle. At that time it was supposed to be fully reusuable, the "big bird little bird" idea that was supposed to make flying into space not a whole lot more complicated than flying across the country.

So I grew up in a house full of space stuff. Giant glossy PR posters, mostly, including one incredibly detailed one about the Apollo missions that covered everything from orbital routes to spacesuit design; also unique memorabilia given only to those who actually worked on the Moon landing, prospectus-type brochures from Martin detailing the kind of stuff they seriously expected to be building within a few years, and--of course--Star Trek stuff. Because that was where we were going, sooner or later. That was the goal.

I grew up with this, waiting each year for it to happen, to start moving forward again. Apollo-Soyuz and Skylab were ... well, they were still something. And surely our retreat from the Moon was temporary, a retrenchment, perhaps an opportunity to do it right the next time by laying the groundwork with a permanent Earth-orbital station that would serve as a dock and transfer point for space-only shuttles between Earth and other destinations. But we weren't going to just give up. Surely not that.

Except we did. Every year, we dropped our expectations a little lower. Even our mass media science fiction reflected the change: from Star Trek and 2001, to Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. From believable visions of a future that we could really build, to heroic fantasy with a technological gloss.

It wasn't until some time in the late 80s, I think, that I finally accepted it wasn't going to happen. We were not, in my adulthood and probably in my entire life, going to be a truly spacefaring species. We could be by now, you know. We could be living on the Moon and Mars, mining the asteroid belt, colonizing Europa and Titan and maybe figuring out, once and for all, if there are any loopholes in our current understanding of physics that might put the stars within reach. And all the work done by Spirit and Opportunity, and that will be done by Curiosity, could be done in a week by a couple of grad students from Areopolis U.

So you'll understand, I hope, if my happiness at seeing Curiosity's success is a little bittersweet. Not because it's not good and satisfying and important, because it is. It's just not enough.

Morford is guilty here of a sin that might be called metaphoricalism--assuming that because he himself often speaks metaphorically, people who insist on literalism must be fools, ignorami, and/or members of a tiny lunatic fringe.

Yes, of course the ability to interpret metaphor is an important characteristic of the intelligent, educated mind. But most of the time, most people mean exactly what they say, and it's a grave mistake to assume otherwise. He really goes off the rails when he insists that mythology must be interpreted in metaphorical terms. There is no reason to believe--no evidence whatsoever--that the people who originally told the stories of Eve, Paris, or the risen Christ thought they were speaking anything other than literal truth; nor were the monsters lurking in the darkness beyond the campfire anything other than our ancestors' attempts to rationalize (not symbolize) the nasty, brutish, and short nature of life throughout most of human history. A metaphorical interpretation of these myths is more reasonable than a literal one, to be sure. It is also, historically and to a large degree in the modern age, a distinctly minority view.

Your terrifying lack of imagination

(Also: âZ"Science is just mysticism disguised as mathematics," says the guy on the internet.)

http://youtu.be/ZHdsUICa7zY Eeh, not the best exit but in my defense it was the first one where I've been "on my own" at the exit. All previous times, someone's been holding on to me.

The second video is my 10th jump. I'm running out of levels to fail, though! I'm much rather take it slow and be sure I have it right than rush through the program.

I've been having no end of problem with glitches in streaming media when the media is stored on the server in my basement. Wired connections are fine, but then again they are all GigE. Wireless-G has been flaky.

I'd spent hours tweaking QoS on my wireless AP to prioritize streaming media to no avail. It always worked for my VoIP phone, so I couldn't figure out why it wasn't for streaming video and audio.

I finally just dumped some packets and figured out why. I post this here for posterity.

Repeat after me: "SMB over TCP is NOT a streaming protocol". Not as far as QoS default labels are concerned.

Sigh. That is what I get for assuming I knew the Linksys definition of "streaming media". SMB over TCP is what is used for remote network shares like the Samba instance my in-home media server runs.

I've mentioned before that I run a version of XBMC called OpenELEC for a wife-friendly way of presenting our media collection on the TV.

I'm currently running OpenELEC v2 Beta 5 and it is flawless. My wife loves it because it is brain-dead simple. I use the Android app for remote control, but have also used a generic Media Center remote an IR receiver. On my project list is to get a Bluetooth remote. I hate having to aim.

The hardware I use is a Zotac HD-ID11 mini-PC. For my use it is almost, but not quite, perfect.

OpenELEC has a tailored distribution just for this type of box. It is optimized for the nVidia ION-2 chipset and under 2 Gb in size.

I don't use a hard drive at all. The system is loaded onto a 4 Gb SD card for total silence, less heat and less power.

The box is mounted on a little VESA bracket that screws into the back of the TV. Perfect fit and totally out of sight. The only cables are HDMI to the TV, power and USB/IR adapter.

My only complaint is their choice of wireless chipset. Included as a mini-PCIe card is an Azurewave combo card which is 2.4 GHz only. That is, 802.11 b/g/n + Bluetooth 3.0.

My experience has been not good in playing HD video (h.264) or audio (Ogg-FLAC) on 2.4 GHz. I have too many things in that frequency in my house and it causes buffering and lag.

So today I opened the box and replaced the Azurewave with an Intel 6230 combo card for $23. Essentially the same specs but with 5.0 GHz a/n support as well.

That solves my problem. There is no lag or delay in playback of HD video or audio using this wireless connection. It isn't as snappy as when it is connected to the GigE wired link, but that is really overkill and this means one less cable and freedom to rearrange furniture.

Everything in this little unit works right out of the box with Linux. The Intel wireless card also just works. No drivers to download, no nothing.

Now to convince it to stream from my Amazon Prime account or Netflix. I think there is an XBMC plug-in for those.

I've mentioned before that I have a small server in my basement that I use for media storage. All my movies, music and TV shows have been ripped from DVD or BluRay and encoded as h.264/AC3 files.

The server is nothing more than a mini PC case with a fanless Via C7 mini-itx motherboard, 2 Gb of RAM and a 2 Tb "green" hard drive. Since it is nothing more than a file server it needs very little horsepower and thus I used the low-power, low-performance parts. It works wonderfully.

I have about 1 Tb of files on it that took me almost a year to rip, encode and properly tag. I really don't want to do it again -- ever, so I bought a little external USB 1 Tb HD for $90 at Walmart.

The external drive is USB 2.0/3.0, but the motherboard is USB 2.0. You'd think 480 Mbps is fast, but once you try and copy over 1 Tb of data it seems a lot slower.

So I bought a USB 3.0 card to stick in the one slot the motherboard has. That was a trick, actually. It seems that the older Via motherboards have PCI slots and that since USB 3.0 is *faster* than the PCI bus, almost no one makes a USB 3.0 PCI expansion card. There are plenty of PCIe cards, but finding a PCI card was harder than I thought.

I finally tracked down one -- and only one -- on Ebay. It is from a Taiwanese OEM named "Serial Technologies Expander", whom I can't find online.

The card works like a champ under Linux. Power down, plug card into slot, plug in power from case power supply (for USB-powered device support) and go. No drivers, no nothing. Plugging in my external drive showed /deb/sdb1 available.

US 3.0 maxes out at 5 Gbps, but the PCI bus tops out at just a hair over 1 Gbps. So I'm not getting the full benefit of USB 3.0, but it is more than twice as fast as the USB 2.0 backup was.

I need to do a full benchmark of the speed just to satisfy by nerd curiosity. Because since I backed up once (just "cp -aR /home/media/* /mnt"), I wasn't really wanting to do the whole thing again. A quick "cp -aRu /home/media/* /mnt" did an "update" and only copied newer files over.

For the record: Makemkv is what I use to strip copy protection and rip DVD and BluRay movies. The actual encoding to h.264 is done with HandBrake. CD audio I rip to Ogg-Flac (lossless) using K3B. It all works like a charm. I chose h.264 for video because damn near everything has hardware acceleration support for it.

For the longest time the cell phone industry operated with a mix of OS vendors, handset makers and carriers each providing bits of the whole in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the competition.

This worked in the beginning, but once cellphones were used for more than just making phone calls it sucked Until Apple came along and showed people how much it sucked no one really saw any way to fix it.

It sucked because all three tiers had different goals and visions. The best business interests of AT&T didn't align with those of Motorola or Nokia, much less Symbian or Sun (JavaME). The result was not so much a fusion of form and function but rather a congealed mass of inconsistent implementation mixed with confusing designs shat out upon the consumer.

Apple caused a seismic shift in the industry by collapsing the OS and handset tier into one and completely neutering the carrier, turning them into a dumb connection that sells access only.

The phenomenal success of the iPhone was heralded as a wake-up call to the industry. But instead of waking up, the carriers and handset manufacturers just dreamed bigger. Apple showed them that 50-80% market domination was possible if only they had the coolest product.

Handset manufacturers like Nokia and Samsung bought or developed their own operating systems, tweaked it all out, and peddled it to carriers.

But none of them have enough mojo to force the carriers to toe the line. AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and the rest still insist on adding their little touches to differentiate. They are really fighting to add enough perceived value so they can charge a bigger price and stave off relegation to commodity dumb network access provider.

And back they are to the way things were. Except the carriers are racing ever faster to commodity status.

Handset makers aren't far behind the carriers and they have Google to thank for that. With the booming popularity and sub-zero cost of Android, big handset makers like Samsung can barely differentiate their hardware from cheap Chinese bulk manufacturers. So they add their software touches like TouchWiz and Sense.

The problem with that model is vanilla Android is pretty damn good. So good that the additions like Sense and TouchWiz aren't seen as enough of a premium to be able to capture a significant market share.

Google, with their Galaxy Nexus phone that Samsung makes essentially collapses the OS and handset maker tiers and by selling the phone unlocked they cut any carrier interference out of the picture.

The handset makers and carriers still try their damnedest to fight commodity status. The result is carriers dragging their feet on upgrading the software -- blaming compatibility issues but the reality is not compatibility with the HARDWARE but with their little software add-ons. (See: CyanogenMod for fixing this.)

Microsoft sort of sees the light. They're moving in Apple's control-the-entire-stack direction. They are fed up with relying one handset makers and carriers to fulfill THEIR vision. Whether or not it works is another story. And right now MS seems to be hedging their bets when it comes to phones. They have their hooks deep enough in Nokia to bring everything in-house but haven't pulled the trigger.

And the latest straw grasp by the carriers and handset manufacturers is partnering with Mozilla for "Firefox phones".

This move may bring some smart phones into the price range of "feature" phones. Telefonica has said the phone price will be significantly cheaper than the low-end Android models, meaning Firefox phones can be priced at levels around $50 excluding operator subsidies.

But after switching from T-Mobile to StraightTalk for essentially the same service and a savings of about 33%, and purging the rest of T-Mobiles infection by installing CyanogenMod, I have seen the light. My phone runs faster, has a longer batter life and is more useful.

What the carriers are providing isn't a value add, it is a value minus. T-Mobile's "features" actually made the user experience *worse*. From what I've seen of Verizon and AT&T, they rate right down there with T-Mobile for value. They exist on inertia alone and commodity status awaits.

Kind of lost in the shuffle over the health care ruling (my opinion, FWIW, is that it's a lousy law, but clearly the best we're going to get in the current political climate, so all in all I'm glad it was upheld; perhaps in another couple of decades, we'll be ready to try again) is this piece of news about another Supreme Court ruling: the court voted 6-3 to strike down the Stolen Valor Act.

I admit to mixed feelings about this. It was clearly the right decision -- any law that limits free speech is prima facie a bad law, and the government's argument that it only restricts "false statements (that) have no value and hence no 1st Amendment protection," to quote the LA Times story, is chilling. We cannot outlaw people telling lies. OTOH, there are a hell of a lot of people using lies about their claimed service for personal advantage (up to and including a certain former President) and this is not only disgusting, it's often outright fraud. The SVA was an exceedingly blunt instrument for a problem that called for a scalpel. I guess the solution I'd like to see is the use of existing criminal fraud statutes for cases where it could be shown that the liar is not just telling stories to impress his buddies at the bar, but actually deriving financial or other measurable gain. Oh yeah, also court-martial for deserters (preceded, where necessary, by other measures such as, oh, say, impeachment, for those whose position places them beyond the usual corrective measures.)

I blame Hollywood, really. At this point they've probably given out more Medals of Honor than have actually been awarded in the entire history of the US military. Lesser decorations have been relegated, in this mindset, to something you get just for showing up. It's not just lazy storytelling; it has a real effect on real people who earn real medals. And no, I'm not saying this should be illegal either, but it should certainly be mocked at every opportunity.

More proof, as if any were needed, that modern conservatism is completely insane.

At this point in the conversation, we're usually treated to a chorus of, "Hey, liberals say crazy things too!" And the answer to that is ... well, yeah, kind of. Which is to say, there are plenty of left-wing lunatics out there, and many of them put their lunacy on display at every opportunity.

The difference is that these left-wing lunatics do not have anywhere near the power or prominence of their right-wing counterparts. They're not hosting nationally syndicated talk shows. They're not parlaying famous last names into political careers. And they are sure as hell not running the Democratic Party, as the right-wing lunatics are clearly running the GOP.

Here's the thing, conservatives. We marginalize and trivialize our extremists. Maybe we shouldn't do that; sometimes the extremists have legitimate grievances. But it's better than what you do with yours. You celebrate and lionize them. It's not just Reagan; it's Limbaugh and Coulter and Savage and Hannity -- and yes, Boehner and Cantor and McConnell, and the current version of Romney (which may of course change next week, or an hour from now, but for now ...) We keep our lunatics locked up. You put yours in charge of the asylum.

So here's my challenge. If you are tired of liberals making hay of every crazy thing some conservative pundit or politician says, do something about it. Point and laugh at your own side's lunatics, as we do. Make us believe that common ground is possible, that you have the same ends for the country that we do even if we disagree about the means. Put your racists and fascists in the same room where we keep our communists and anarchists, and keep them decently out of public view.

Or if you're not willing to do this, understand that we have no choice but to consider you just as bad as the worst of your number, and act accordingly.