Entries from March 2003 ↓

According to SpaceRef, all those CPU cycles donated by me and 4,000,000 other space geeks have produced at least 150 spots in the sky worth taking another look at.

I’ve been running the SETI@home screensaver on 3 computers for nearly 4 years now, and I still find it fascinating to pop up the application once in a while and watch it “chirping data”, computing “fast Fourier transforms” and “searching for pulses/triplets”. Whatever all that means…

What’s even more exciting about my participation in the project, is the way SETI@home has enabled scientists and researchers to consider projects which they never before would have had the computing resources to undertake. Projects like distributed.net‘s RC5 effort, Stanford’s Folding@home project, Evolutionary-Research‘s evolution@home and dozens of others are able to tap into the unused computing power of the world’s millions of personal computers.

Whether or not SETI@home’s re-analysis of the 150 or so hotspots turns up a real ET this time, it’s certain that this is just the beginning of truly cooperative research.

In my previous entry on the Estrada nomination and filibuster, I noted that the problem with Estrada was that there is a limited paper trail and that Mr. Estrada was not very forthcoming during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I think that this should become less of a problem in the future as more and more lawyers are writing on the internet — and especially publishing blogs. When Eugene Volokh or Howard Bashman or Lawrence Lessig or Denise Howell or Ernest Svenson are nominated for judgeships, there will be no doubts as to their ideas, opinions, writing styles and reasoning abilities. While my politics may be very different from any of these people, I would have no problem supporting them for judgeships based on their thoughtfulness, seriousness and abilities to look at all sides of an issue. For this alone, I see blogs as a fundamental good in the judicial system.

The Democratic filibuster of the nomination vote for Miguel Estrada to the lifetime appointment as a Justice of the DC Circuit Court, has been going on for weeks. I have supported this filibuster because I felt that Mr. Estrada had not provided enough information to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his appearance before the committee last fall.

The pro bono work Mr. Estrada has performed and the limited number of his writings indicate that Mr. Estrada is strongly opposed to many of the progressive social causes and issues which the Federal Courts have decided in the past four decades. This anecdotal record, along with his reticence before the Judiciary Committee, gives the Senate little to go on in its role of advisor to the President in these matters. Therefore, any Senate vote on Mr. Estrada right now will be a purely political vote, providing no advice and failing in that body’s Constitutional obligation.

But now, it’s time for the filibusterers to put their money where their mouths are. As Howard Bashman reports in his (always fascinating) blog,

Estrada’s responses are reasoned, well thought-out, and although his answers refer more to process than substance, maintaining that he is not responding is becoming disingenuous. I urge more Senators — and I will be writing to my Senators Sarbanes and Mikulski today — to submit questions to Estrada, which I am certain Howard, in his role as a true Model Citizen, will continue to post.

I welcome these questions, even though I might not like the answers. I hope that more Senators submit questions, or that Chairman Hatch of the Judiciary Committee will agree to schedule another round of hearings. Suspicions about Mr. Estrada’s motives and intentions can be allayed by exposure to Justice Brandeis’s “sunlight“.

Last week, the world was shocked by revelations that the US had ramped up its spying efforts on the undecided members of the UN Security Council. The Observer broke the story, receiving a copy of a memo, seemingly from the US National Security Agency to associated agencies in allied countries.

The news made little impact here in the US, but worldwide, there was a great deal of outrage. Obviously, there was behind-the-scenes outrage in the US government, too, since the Observer announced today that a British woman, an employee

It’s good to know that our intelligence agencies are cooperating to catch all the important people.

[Via filchyboyotope]

Somebody needs to introduce our Vice President to the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Y’know… the one about not “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. Maybe someone could stick a copy in his pocket the next time he slips off to his “undisclosed location“.

That might keep him from having his lawyers send letters to the parody site, whitehouse.org, demanding they take down a fake biography and pictures of Second Lady Lynne Cheney.

The lawyer letter seems to imply that a precedent against using her picture for the purpose of trade trumps the supreme law of the land. Cheney — Mr. Halliburton, to his friends — should ask his buddies on the Supreme Court — the guys and gal who elected him and his boss — for their opinions on the constitutional protections for parody. He should also ask them about the greater burden of proof borne by public figures in matters of libel. (And anyone who has their own page on the Official US Government White House site certainly qualifies as a public figure.)

I wonder if Mr. & Mrs. Cheney and their lawyers ever concerned themselves with the personal privacy implications of the myriad parodies directed at the previous First and Second Ladies?

It’s not that surprising that Mr. I-Had-Other-Priorities-During-The-Vietnam-War Cheney is ignorant about the Constitution, but it is pretty surprising that he has the time to bother with his wife’s hurt feelings. As John Wooden, one of the publishers of whitehouse.org, says in an interview with Salon Magazine, “You would think they’d have better things to do. Fixing our imploding economy, perhaps.” Oh, and that Iraq thing, too…

Access is all to reporters. And with the mainstream press’s performance at the presidential press conference the other night, it is obvious that reporters value their access much more than the truth or their historical watchdog status.

Our government was designed with a series of checks and balances to ensure that, despite the separation of powers, no one branch could trample over the others. According to Professor Paul Johnson of Auburn University, some of the checks and balances work like this:

Over the past several years — and especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — we’ve seen the checks and balances eroding away. Last fall Congress ceded its powers related to declaring war to the President’s discretion. With a compliant Congress, President Bush has yet to use his veto power. The Supreme Court usurped the role of Congress in deciding the outcome of the 2000 Florida elections. The Justice Department and the Vice-President have stonewalled in Congress’s attempts to read documentation related to their oversight of the nation’s finances.

When those checks and balances begin to fail, we look to the press to shine a light on the excesses of a nascent imperial government. As Thomas Jefferson said,

But is the mainstream press doing the job Jefferson expected it would do? It doesn’t seem that way. We’re treated to multiple investigative journalism pieces on Michael Jackson(!), but virtual silence on connections between Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and others in the administration and Saddam Hussein or the Saudi despots or the Enron debacle. There are investigations into Martha Stewart’s alleged insider trading, but how many of the Enron or Worldcom or Tyco or Adelphia principals have been brought to justice? What restictions are journalists agreeing to in return for being “embedded” and getting to play with the army’s hardware in the new Gulf War? Where is the outrage at the limited contact the press has with the President and the Vice-President?

In his first prime-time press conference since the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in October 2001, President Bush presented his prepared remarks and then reiterated those prepared remarks whenever he was asked a question. About the only answer which seemed mildly unscripted was to the ridiculous softball question about how his faith is guiding him. He demonstrated his disdain by dissing Helen Thomas; at 82 years old and a veteran of 40 years and 9 presidents, she has long been given the honor of asking the opening question at the White House. At this conference, however, Bush’s handlers didn’t dare take the chance that Thomas would stray off script.

In the days when the checks and balances actually seemed to work, the press was sometimes referred to as “the fourth branch of government” for its ability to offset the the power of the three constitutional branches.

Unfortunately for the citizenry, the “fourth branch” has become just as compromised as the other three; where that description was once a badge of honor, it has now become a shameful epithet. As journalist Salim Muwakkil has said

How dare librarians not practice civil disobedience when the FBI comes storming into their libraries demanding they hand over their circulation records! How dare they avoid their ethical duty to protect their patrons at the cost of their own freedom! How dare librarians (and near-minimum-wage bookstore cashiers) obey their employers who have instructed them to comply with requests from law enforcement at risk of their jobs!

Professor David Price is outraged at librarians not standing up for what he believes in. From safe in his ivory tower at leafy St. Martin’s College, where his employer is likely to defend him from any intrusions on his academic freedom, he is very quick to accuse others of being the “equivalent of FBI extension agents” for not risking all to resist an unfair law. In his black-and-white world:

It’s the typical disconnect between academia and the “real” world. Only in academia and religion are there absolutes in human behavior. Everywhere else there are compromises between theory abstracted from existence and the complexity of daily life and its responsibilities. I despise the Patriot Act, and I’ve had a number of discussions (diatribes?) about it with my wife, who manages a large, chain bookstore. When she asked her management about what to do in case the FBI showed up at her store demanding information, they told her to call the corporate office, but not to interfere with the legal execution of the warrant, because, although they have opposed such subpoenas in the past, it is not the individual store’s decision to make. It was obvious to her that no support would be given to individuals who violate the law. Ethically, Dr. Price would say there is simply no question as to what she should do.

Of course, Professor Price’s own ethics are malleable. As far as I remember, there are no codicils to the basic maxim: “Thou shalt not steal.” I am sure that the Benedictine Order who run the College in which he teaches would agree. Yet, in his article, Price relates a story about a conversation with a colleague who, over the past couple of months

Actually, this anecdote reveals nothing about librarians. Rather, in laughing about theft, it reveals Price’s own hypocrisy regarding ethics. Further evidence of his own lack of ethical rigor are his omissions, when quoting from the ALA Code of Ethics, of the following paragraph:

The librarians I know are troubled and distressed by the continuing clampdown on civil liberties and freedoms, exacerbated by opportunistic ideologues in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. These librarians are often underpaid, underfunded, understaffed, overworked, fearful that their budgets and jobs will be traded for military expenditures. Yet, they remain committed to educating the public and providing access to information, despite attacks from the self-righteous.

The librarians I know are also too ethical to think of blacklisting a book, but long memories are almost a requirement for their jobs. I wonder how many of them will closely evaluate their collections this fall, to see if they really need a book called Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists by David H. Price.