I - OBL dead - Oh, Big Deal!

Smoking hot headlines and big news this week! Osama bin Laden has been found and killed by Navy Seals at his compound in Pakistan. It really is a big deal in one sense, in that the capture or killing of OBL has been a priority in the U.S. for the last decade, but on a more realistic note, look down the CNN headline picture on the left. Down... farther... just a bit farther... Yes! There it is! Just below the sub-head that reads "Latest News". See that item there? The one that says "Gas could soon top $4 nationwide"? How about them apples, huh?

Sure the killing of OBL probably deserves some big headlines - at least for a day or two - but the real issues are down below the fold. (OK, old newspaper terminology, I know, but it fits.) Down there are the issues with the economy, the flooding in Missouri (and the rest of the Midwest), the twisters across the South and Southeast, and a whole slew of other real problems that haven't changed a bit while we froth at the mouth over the killing of one terrorist leader. You can't even *find* a current article on the nuclear reactor mess in Japan.

Al Qaeda has not really been hurt by this action, and it probably has done more harm than good to the international opinion of the U.S., but the press wants to make it into a huge thing. I have to suspect that at least part of the motivation is to make our president look more presidential, but I think I hear the Nobel committee asking for their prize back. Terrorism will continue (and probably get worse for a while), and the economy will stay in the tank. Lybia will still be a huge challenge and Afghanistan is going to keep soaking up dollars and lives, but the press will feel good about the war on terror. Frankly, I think that Dubya hit the nail on the head back in '02 or whenever it was when he said that he neither knew nor cared where Bin Laden was. It didn't mean that he wasn't interested in getting him if the opportunity presented itself, but it meant that he understood that the real problems of global terrorism went back to nations like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia who support terrorism or provide the economic conditions that drive people toward the radical elements.

When we defeat terrorism, in all its guises not just Al Qaeda, it will owe more to Wal-Mart than the Navy SEALs. We will defeat terrorism when all of the people in these countries have a standard of living that allows them hope for the future and the ability to pursue happiness in their lives right now. Only with the replacement of totalitarian regimes with governments sensitive to the needs of all the people and with diversified economic growth not tied to the elite few will the radical element begin to recede. But that's a process for the decades and doesn't make the kind of headlines that sell papers, I guess.

R - One Man's Wilderness

One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey, By Sam Keith from the journals and photographs of Richard Proenneke

In 1968 Dick Proenneke was flown into the Twin Lakes in Alaska and started to build a cabin. Dick was 51 years old and had a lifetime of working with his hands behind him. He possessed the type of skills that were essential to making his dream of living in the Alaska wilderness possible.

This book, taken from Dick's journals and re-worked by Sam Keith, chronicles the construction of the cabin and the first two years that Dick spent there. I ended up reading it because my wife has a strong attraction to Alaska and told me it was a "must read". Roughly the first two-thirds of the book are devoted to the process of building the cabin and the challenges he faced during that period. The last part is mostly concerned with some of his explorations around the area and the wildlife he encountered.

I have to admit that I found the first part of the book far more interesting than the latter part. That probably reflects how I tend to get very involved in books that are focused on the engineering aspects of life, the "how do we do this?" kind of thing. There are some rather interesting thoughts that occurred to me while reading those pages. First, I thought about how I would have done some of it a bit differently. There are a lot of ways to build a log cabin and there is certainly nothing wrong with how Dick did it, but it provides me with a great deal of enjoyment to visualize alternate approaches that might have taken less labor, yielded better (in my mind) results, and possibly made less use of non-natural materials. Case in point is that Dick assembled many parts using nails where I would have used wooden pegs. He also used tar paper and plastic sheeting on the roof under a thick layer of moss. His method worked very well, but I would have probably split shakes instead.

The other thought that kept coming to my mind was that he was in phenomenal physical condition (and obviously remained that way since he lived in the cabin all or part of each of the next 30 years). I kept thinking that there was no way on earth I could do what he did. I might have the skills, but I no longer have the strength or stamina, and that was a bit of a melancholy thought.

If you have an interest in the Alaskan wilderness and in log cabins and isolation then I think you would find this a very good read. There are also a couple of follow-up books and the journals are available on-line in PDF format. I'll post the links as I find them.

The book on Amazon.com

More Readings From One Man's Wilderness - A huge PDF file of Dick's journals from 1974-1980

Alone in the Wilderness - a web site by Bob Swerer about Dick Proenneke

I - Face it, 1984 was an underestimate.

Google making app that would identify people's faces

George Orwell wrote the book "1984" to highlight the decline in personal privacy and the rise of government intrusion into the lives of the citizens. Somehow I think he was a bit conservative in his evaluation of what was going to come. When I read an article like this - knowing that the technology is not only out there, but being widely used by police forces and businesses already - I have to wonder just how soon we will be without freedom of any sort other than what the "powers that be" are willing to grant us.

We already have red light cameras that identify our license plate and mail us a ticket. How long before every illegal action is filmed and the perpetrator identified by the computer? Sounds OK, until you think about the number of people who look similar. Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable when it comes to identifying criminals, is the computer going to do better? More to the point, what else can be done with this?

The government knows what car you drive and where you live, thanks to DMV records. Combine that with every other bit of data about you that is floating around and there is reason to start getting paranoid. Do you own a gun? The state knows that, even if you think that they don't. It's quite simple, if you have ever bought a hunting license or gotten a concealed weapons permit they can be pretty confident that you own one or more. Now lets put a camera outside every gun store and we have an even easier way to identify that particular dangerous element.

Maybe you just like to try to tweak the local politicos on one subject or another. With a bit of technology they can follow you from one surveillance camera to another until they catch you doing something they don't like - and it doesn't take any people to do it, just a faceless computer. Now it is cheap and easy to keep tabs on all sorts of people you previously would have ignored. Eventually you can monitor everyone in the country to make sure they aren't doing anything questionable (by government standards).

But the government is only half of this equation. The other part is that this is very useful for companies trying to sell their products. They can now cross-reference you to your interests for more tightly targeted advertising and then use what they learn about you from other sources to manipulate you to buy (or to support them in other ways - think of subtly coercing the majority to forgive BP for the Gulf oil spill). The more they know about you the more they can influence you. Once again, this doesn't take a single person to do it, it is all done by a computer program mining the internet for data about you.

These things are here. We can't un-ring the bell, we just have to learn how to adapt to a society where it is virtually impossible to do anything that is not only recorded somewhere, but is actively used to track you, manipulate you and quite possibly to oppress you.

Orwell missed by a few years, but in a lot of ways he was a pretty good prophet.

I - Oscars or Oscar Mayer?

So the Oscars weren't quite as exciting as people hoped. Strange. The movies this year weren't all that great either. Maybe the two are related - or maybe three hours of watching people who exist in a fantasy world fawning all over themselves and each other is just not really interesting.

I think they need to start giving out awards for corporate auditors. They could have a category for most graft uncovered and for fastest exposing of undeserved bonuses. They could show film clips of the contestants studying balance sheets and making the ten-key rattle. Not only would it be highlighting something that is both real and important, I doubt you could get more than about 15 minutes out of the whole program, half-hour tops, and that would be good too.

The other really strange thing is that the same people who are griping about the Oscars being slow and boring are the ones who complain that football is slow and boring. Lets compare three hours of watching a bunch of overpaid, narcissistic, extroverts - no, wait, that applies to both - try 3 hours of who did the best job of pretending to be someone else to 3 hours of the most complex and intellectual sport ever invented. Plus with football you get violence (always a top seller, and football violence isn't done with stunt-men), you don't have to wear a tux, and you can get up and get a hot dog. So we're back to the Oscars - Oscar Mayers, that is.

L - Big Load

Well, it's been just over 40 weeks since I last posted. That's enough time to produce a normal human baby, so I guess a new post is reasonable.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see a semi-load of Styrofoam? Here is your chance. I took this picture at a rest stop along I-5 in Washington State. The truck is hauling a full load of Styrofoam blocks. I gave the driver a hard time about having such a heavy load, but then found out that the blocks are actually part of a bridge construction system and will be used as forms for pouring concrete. The styrofoam allows for complex shapes and hollow (ok, filled with foam) parts, creating elaborately engineered load-bearing structures that take less concrete and are more rigid and able to handle earthquakes and such better. Amazing what a semi-load of foam can mean.

We sometimes fall into this pattern of thinking where we assume that something is a big load, or a light load or a worthless load, and don't take the time to really find out what that load is all about. Life has a lot of things in it that are not what they seem, even the light loads can turn out to be pretty significant down the road.

I - Hokey Hookah Holla'

MSNBC has this article about how Hookah pipes are becoming the preferred substitute for cigarettes among young people.

I have to wonder if their research is quite as complete as they want you to think it is, since they seem to have a somewhat naive idea that the only thing burning in that hookah bowl is fruit flavored tobacco. Now I don't want to put myself forward as any sort of expert on these things, but I'm a bit inclined to think that the popularity of the hookah has more to do with some of the possible alternatives to peach tobacco that might be getting incinerated. Think of various international smokes that might be successfully smoked in your hookah - say, Thai, Columbian, Mexican, Matanuskan and possibly just a bit of local inflammables.

I suspect that any use of commercially available tobacco products is more of a side-effect of the never-ending quest of the North-American Slacker to find a way to avoid the major harsh-out that comes from that last nasty puff on the blunt.

L - Ugly Van

So I have to wonder just what the designers were thinking here. This must be the ugliest mini-van I've ever been forced to look at. Someone should introduce them to this little concept called "proportion". After that maybe they could work on "flow". If we get really lucky they'll stop channeling the guy who designed the AMC Pacer long enough to study "style".

This beast has been parked at the local Ford dealer for a couple months and I keep hoping it will either grow on me and start to look cute or something or else sell so I don't have to look at it any more. Neither seems to be happening, so I'm forced to write about it for the T-WHIRL.

T - Rant - Government Web Sites

Why does it seem like any web site associated with the government was designed by idiots who last payed attention to the Internet back in about 1990? Their sites are horribly designed with absolutely no flow to them and the data input forms are archaic beyond belief. I just tried to put a date into the FAFSA web form and discovered that they want it as 02152010 rather than something a normal human might think up - like say 02/15/2010. I've been getting more and more pissed about these things lately because there is absolutely no excuse for them. It is simply a case of incompetent people being paid by the taxpayers to produce crap. Maybe they ought to think about firing them all and getting some web programmers who have at least basic knowledge of e-commerce and web programming. At least when an on-line merchant has an unusable site you can vote with your dollars. There just doesn't seem to be anything to be done about lousy government sites.

T - Recycle Bins

Driving around town today. In one neighborhood it was the first recycling pickup since Christmas. I found it very interesting to look at the bins and study the cardboard in them. Oh, this house got a new Wii, and this one got a Blu-Ray player, and over here they got an HDTV. It really is amazing how much our trash says about us. For many years police departments have cautioned people about putting boxes from high-end electronics out in the trash where burglars can use them as a shopping guide for which houses to break into. I never really thought about it too much until today when it was abundandly apparent that most people enthusiastically announce to anyone who wants to know that they have just gotten a new electronic gadget. Maybe a little thought and caution really is in order.

W - Sherlock Holmes

Went and saw this with my son the other day. He seems to get me out to new movies a lot. I really wasn't sure what to expect on this because the previews were a bit confusing in that they seemed to want to portray it as a comedy with occasional bursts of drama. The reviews I read, on the other hand, tried to compare it to the Sherlock Holmes books and seemed disappointed that the movie didn't live up to the books in terms of dramatic content. The previews seemed promising, however, so off we went.

The first thing I would have to say is that this is not the classic Holmes you've seen in the past. Robert Downey, Jr. does a fine job of being this interpretation of the great detective. He has the right blend of OCD, slackerdom and frenetic energy to make the character work.

Jude Law as Dr. Watson seems to come across more often as petulant than profound. The portrayal of the character somehow doesn't quite match the role Dr. Watson has in the film. But that is really a minor nit, the general feel between the two characters works most of the time. The female leads don't really have much point to them, but they do add a bit of eye-candy.

The plot itself is well-crafted, with that traditional Holmesian sense that you are dealing with the supernatural. Strange things happen and strange people do them. Mark Strong does a great job as the evil Lord Blackwood. I felt a bit like his character was not quite entirely developed, but he did a superb job of showing his contempt for Holmes and all ordinary mortals.

Finally, the cinematography was better than most recent films I've seen, without too much of the rapid cuts and scene changes that make it hard to watch so many films today. In addition the sets are very richly developed - even if a lot of the backgrounds are so clearly paintings.

Overall it was a film that I enjoyed thoroughly, not too heavy, not too deep, not too trivial (although without any particular moral), fun to watch and with enough twists and turns to the plot to keep me interested all the way through. I give it a slightly conditional B+ and recommend it with no real reservations.