Obama opposes Bush endangered species proposal — AP

“Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne defended the changes in a call with reporters Monday, calling them narrow modifications to make the law more clear and efficient.

In recent years, both federal agencies and developers have complained that the reviews, which can result in changes to projects that better protect species, have delayed work and increased costs.

The proposed regulations, which will be published Thursday in the Federal Register, included one significant change from the earlier draft: The public comment period was cut in half, from 60 to 30 days.

“In this case, it was determined that we need to move forward in a timely fashion,” said Interior Department spokeswoman Tina Kreisher.”

“In this case, it was determined that we need to move forward in a timely fashion”: worst sentence ever.

I’m leaving today for 2 weeks of field work in Arizona and New Mexico.

I’m doing some field reconnaissance in support of my weird thesis research on self-organizing plant patterns in the semi-desert. That mostly means I’ll be driving around in rental cars, looking to see what the places I’ve been peering at from above actually look like in person. Also camping out in the high desert at night, looking to see what patterns the stars have. I’ll be in the Tucson/Sierra Vista region, then north of Flagstaff and up to the rim of the Canyon, then training into Santa Fe/Los Alamos area. I’m taking the Southwest Chief back to Chicago and Ann Arbor on the 23rd.

Do you see a pattern? I don’t see a pattern.

Here’s a video of Danny O’Brien convincing you not to put your data in cloud computing services, like 3rd party email, web document editors, photo hosting sites, social networking sites, and the like. He argues a) why would you give your own data, including your most personal data, to an anonymous corporate mediator to store in any case and b) we can probably get the same always-on effortless sharing and still store our data on our own boxes through the magic of technology. The video is terrible. But the idea seems awfully good.

And here’s a guy who makes heavy use of Google’s online services, such as Picasa and Google Docs and Gmail, who has been suddenly, silently and inexplicably shut out of the Google cloud.

I’ve decided to start spelling Google with a capital G again, to remind myself that Google and Google services are not randomly beneficent forces of nature. Google is a company, and it lives a corporate life. Is that (or Yahoo, or Facebook or whomever) the cloud where you want to keep all your stuff?

‘Kenneth L. Wainstein, the White House adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism, recently visited Denver and St. Paul, a trip that reflected the administration’s interest in the conventions. “In the post-9/11 world, you have to prepare and plan for all contingencies,” Mr. Wainstein said. “That means preparing for everything from a minor disruption and an unruly individual to a broader terrorist event. We need to plan for everything no matter what the threat level is on any particular day.”’

Denver Police Brace for Convention — NYT

I’m not sure what metric you would use to measure an Apollo Project, but it seems as though the Large Hadron Collider may be an Apollo-scale project. Everything custom-built, the tolerances are minute, and the scale and complexity is unthinkable. And it’s almost done.

A physicist I met at a party explained to me that a fundamental paradigm regarding the way matter is organized will be confirmed or contra-indicated pretty much as soon as they turn the thing on. I don’t remember the details, but I remember being deeply impressed. Then somebody started fighting.

From CERN User’s Pages:

Special Announcements

LHC access
Please consult new access conditions before entering the tunnel

Important information for all regular CERN dosimeter holders: Do not forget to read your dosimeter, even if you have not entered the controlled radiation areas

Information importante pour les utilisateurs de dosimètre régulier : N’oubliez pas de lire votre dosimètre, même si vous n’êtes pas entrés dans les zones contrôlées

Prevention – Diagnosis – Eliminating noise
4 to 8 August 2008, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Infirmary, Bld. 57

Prévention - Dépistage - Stop au bruit
du 4 au 8 août 2008, de 9h à 16h, Infirmerie, Bât. 57

How did I not know that there’s a new Civilization game? There goes my work. Oh wait, it hasn’t been released on PC. Well, at least I can do my work. Yay.

It’s not immeadiately clear if Sid Meier is directly involved with this version.

“All this shopping sucks,
All these sickly white shoppers.
All this easy space, time unused,
My parts are healing that once were bruised.”
– Love Song to Little Trees, Bill Crosson

I’ve made a Google Earth-compatible .kmz file with all the AVIRIS flightline locations from 2000 to 2006, as listed on the AVIRIS website. Google Earth is a relatively painless and speedy way to get a sense of the landscape sensed in each imagery dataset.

More information and the file itself is available on this page.

(AVIRIS is NASA’s plane-mounted hyperspectral sensor. It is entirely a coincidence that I’m posting this on NASA’s 50th birthday but hey, happy birthday NASA.)

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was signed into existence 50 years ago today. The Economist has a good, reasonably breif, article about the intentions and directions of the agency. Being the Economist, it’s partially speculation about potential private-industry virtues of “space exploration”. But the article is more about the division between the dreams of the manned and unmanned branches of the agency. It also mentions the earth-observing program, which I think is a third NASA branch unto itself. The article suggests the unmanned probe makers may tolerate the manned exploration romantics just as cover and funding-bait. And possibly vice a versa. Maybe the earth-observers can likewise use both the manned and the unmanned missions as an infrastructure to exploit. Either dream is closer to the original mandate of the massive NASA bureaucracy than building satellites to measure the environment, which could be a hard sell on it’s own. Or maybe, nowadays, astronauts and probes both just draw away money and steam it off into space.

Many happy returns? — The Economist

Also see A Rocket to Nowhere, from a few years back.

Rest easy, here’s a list of all the priests to appear or even be mentioned in the television series Father Ted.

From “Priests we merely hear about”:

# Father Kiernan who apparently told lots of stories, was chubby and jolly, and shot himself (CT)
# Father Clippit does a good long Mass. Three hours on a good night. Since his stroke. (AGCW)
# Father Jimmy Ranable, a pupil of Jack’s many years ago, who subsequently perpetrated the Drumshanbo massacre. (GUHER)
# Father Jez Flatham, a former acquaintance of Ted’s who now makes $50,000 a year lap-dancing, apparently. (ACT)
# Father Buzz Dolan, former winner of the Golden Cleric award who moved to Canada and got a part in the new Bond film. (ACT)

Nobody bothered to tell me, so I thought I’d tell you: new albums by Beck, the Silver Jews, and (soon) Brian Eno/David Byrne.

Yep, that’s right, Eno & Byrne are cranking out a new one, just 27 years after My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. “Everything that Happens Will Happen Today”. When those two get together, it’s just a matter decades before sparks fly. (But seriously folks, Bush of Ghosts is awesome, I’m dieing to hear the new one.) August 18 release. Now that Eno is a serious thinker about time scales and generative systems and Byrne is a serious thinker about powerpoint, what kind of music will they make?

You probably heard Beck’s Modern Guilt before I did. You probably liked it. It’s a bit less artsy-wacky than standard Beck fair, less sonorous than Sea Change, very locked-beat groovy. The guy’s a master. He should recieve an honorary Master’s degree.

You probably don’t like the Silver Jews. But I do and I’m gonna go listen to Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea right now. The Silver Jews make the best packing-to-leave music on the planet. Once I’ve packed up to leave somewhere I’ll give this new one a review.

The coverage coming out of the first military tribunal at Guantanamo is freakish and disturbing.

The agency name that dare not be spoken — LA Times

“To have an impressive backdrop for the government’s daily spin on the tribunal proceedings, a Pentagon engineering unit built and furnished a press briefing room inside the abandoned hangar that houses journalists covering the Hamdan trial.

At a cost of nearly $50,000, the news-conference room at Camp Justice — as the Expeditionary Legal Complex is known — has one serious problem: You can’t hear a thing when the giant air conditioner is turned on, and you can’t breathe when it isn’t.

The roaring AC is turned off just seconds before the Pentagon public affairs officers approach the podium in front of the Stars and Stripes and the five flags of the uniformed services.”

The Orwell jokes just aren’t funny any more. I’m depressed. Of course there’s plenty of coverage which reports incidental facts, stripped of context. Maybe I should just read that.

Last week a couple of senior-highschool-looking kids walked boldly on to my porch and took the bottles and cans from my recycling bin. They returned them to a minivan piloted by a soccer-dad looking dad. They were not perturbed when I came out on the porch and watched them leaving. Today a homeless guy (at least he claimed to be homeless) knocked on the door and asked if he could do the same. And tried to sell me a colour TV. Apparently it works good.

My household manages to get the recycling to the curb about one week out of two. So having the porch cleared of the tin and glass weekly is a service to me. And I’m enough of a capatilist to assume that if these folks are taking my waste somewhere that is willing to pay them for it, then that somewhere is presumably more reliably going to in turn move it somewhere productive. So this is all fine with me. Bring on the binners. If Ann Arbor’s economy is supporting this degree of specialization, maybe it means it is really a city.

Wordle is a brilliantly flexible applet for creating text clouds. It has suddenly become very important for me to wear one of my papers as a tshirt. Or perhaps to write a paper worth wearing as a tshirt.

Here is Historical context for endogenous theories of ecological diversity:

I will never buy a bike from Rivendell Bicycle Works, but I like that they exist.

Have a look at their company history (which includes a hard-numbers explanation of their charming financial status) and click through some of the bike models. But don’t ask for a custom unless you really need one. They’re all sculptures anyway.

“The A. Homer Hilsen’s versatility isn’t a result of design genius or high tech breakthroughs. Its versatility comes the way versatility always comes: by means of properly dimensioned tubes and properly located bridges, which lead to the clearances that fenders with medium-volume tires require.
It feels odd to boast about that or even mention it at all, because it’s kind of a boring topic, and it seems as though making forks the right length and putting the seat stay- and chain stay-bridges in the right spot for good clearance should be a given.”

Walnut Creek, California. But they do mail order. If you are ordering by mail, they recommend describing your custom paint colour to them by referencing crayola crayons.

I say I will never buy a bike from Rivendell, and that is true. But there is one condition in which I might: when The Change comes (or finishes coming), and I am shopping for one bicycle that will function as a universal vehicle and survive decades of wear, and assuming that I am living near enough to California or in it, such that shipping will not be prohibitive, then Rivendell is exactly the sort of local bicycyle blackshop I would wish to shop at. And possibly buy (order and wait 3 months) this one, if they have by that time decided to redesign it for standardly available wheels.

Some good reading from the last week or so:

Panty Raid, 1952 – Michigan Today, U-M Heritage

By now it was 9 p.m., and for a moment the storm seemed to have spent itself. But then the milling crowd of men spotted a counterattack heading their way: a horde of women flooding into Central Campus from the Hill.

The women aimed straight at the symbol of male privilege—the front door of the Union, which by tradition was never to be entered by an unaccompanied female. They surged through the Union, then into all-male West Quad, where “several quadders, caught unawares with their shorts on, were forced to scamper for safety,” according to the Daily.

 Apparently the chaotic-spontaneous archetype of what apparently became a fad of campus panty raid riots. Charming on one level, disturbing on another, given the mistily ambiguous allusions to rape.

Me and My Girls — David Carr, NYT

“But that’s where the plot thickens and the facts collide. Erin and Meagan were born on April 15, 1988. Whenever I felt compelled to explain myself and the cold facts of our history, that night outside Kenny’s was the necessary moment. In the story as I recited it, that horrible night occurred very soon after they were born. I thought I quickly entered treatment because even though I had been an unreliable employee, a conniving friend and a duplicitous husband, nothing in my upbringing allowed me to proceed as a bad father. The twins were then whisked into temporary foster care soon after their birth. After that, it’s a Joseph Campbell monomyth in which our hero embraces his road of trials, begins to attain a new Self and hotfoots it back to the normal world.

Nice story if you can live it. If the girls were born in April, and I went into treatment a few months afterward, as I have always said, where did the snowsuits come from? Minnesota is cold, but not that cold.”

This has now shown up on Boing Boing, but if you don’t know, now you know. Times columnist and former hard-core junky David Carr investigates his own past. Highly recommended.

Taking the Cure - The Walrus, Christopher Shulgan

“As the night wrapped up, Keithley let slip that the band’s tour van was having mechanical problems — something that might prevent them from attending their next gig at a snow-boarding competition in Fernie. Verigin and his friends immediately began burning through their cellphone minutes, trying to track down someone in the region who would be able to fix the band’s van at the crack of dawn.

I saw something in that moment. Until then, I had lumped the Doukhobors in with ultra-conservative sects like the Amish and the Mennonites. But Verigin and the rest of the Kootenay Doukhobors were anything but conservative. After more than a century in Canada, they retained their communitarian sensibilities, and their anti-authoritarian, anarchist vibe. They were far more comfortable alongside counter-culture legends like Joe Keithley than buggy-riding Christian conservatives.”

Christopher Shulgan wrote a biography of Aleksandr N. Yakovlev, who is credited with influencing Gorbachev towards perestroika. This is his story of Yakovlev’s vist, as the Soviet Ambassador to Canada,  to the Doukhobor sect of Castlegar BC. He convincingly theorizes that the Doukhobors were a turning point for Yakovlev. Even if I hadn’t been living near Castlegar this summer, I think this would still be a heck of a tale.

Memories of a Dead Seer: Werewolf at Foocamp08! - Jane McGonigal

“Having played nearly 100 games with the Ultimate Optimal Villager strategy, I have only ONCE seen a Werewolf play this strategy and pull it off. (In games where the village isn’t playing by this strategy, it’s actually quite common for a Werewolf to successfully claim to be the Seer.) It will probably hurt me in future games to admit that this was a game in which I was the Werewolf and Jimmy Wales was the Seer and investigated me on the first night. So, um, forget that I said that.”

On a lighter note, an informal rundown of the culture of the party game werewolf (aka mafia) at geek conventions, and a game-theory guide to probable victory. 

This article from the NYT on Obama’s foreign policy infrastructure has some interesting tidbits about how foreign policy theory from academics and institutes gets translated into stated policy.

A Cast of 300 Advises Obama on Foreign Policy

“Out in the netherworld of the 300, advisers often say they are unclear about what happens to all the policy paragraphs they churn out on request. “It’s all mysterious what we send him and what gets to him,” said Michael A. McFaul, a Russia scholar at Stanford University who leads the Russia and Eurasia team for the Obama campaign.

Other team leaders include Ivo H. Daalder, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has organized his 40-member nuclear nonproliferation team into eight working groups, and Philip H. Gordon, another scholar at the institution, who is in charge of Mr. Obama’s Europe team.”

(note that registration and full demogrpahic disclosure is required by the NYT before you can look at their website.)

Eric Russell’s GIS extension for NetLogo has been released as a 1.0 version. Eric has licensed it as fully open source, in the hopes that it will be developed further by the community, which is great. It will come bundled with the 4.0.3 version of NetLogo, which is due out shortly (and will not be open source at all. When CCL? When?).

It’s too bad the upcoming Language as a Complex Adaptive System conference won’t have a poster session, or I’d use the GIS extension to roll some realistically spatial population-distribution data into my accent formation model and see if it generated any interesting results to poster up.

Campus/community radio stations can wax and wane as the semesters turn and the djs come and go. For as long as I’ve been listening to them, CJSR out of Edmonton has been consistently great.

Currently listening to Tish and Sarah’s show, Famous Last Words. And I’m hearing music I don’t know from Edmonton, Chicago, and the Funk Cloud. “Thursdays from 9-11am (MST)”. Recommended.