- Nick Packwood on a reason to be proud of Canada: “Canada’s entire delegation is set to walk out of the United Nations General Assembly chamber when Persian tyrant, Twelver whack job and Holocaust denier/enthusiast Mahmoud Ahmadinejad takes the podium.”
- Talking down to irresponsible American adults. “Secretary Chu said he didn’t think that the public would throw the same political temper tantrum over climate legislation has has happened with the healthcare debate.”
- “You Can Have Either Sex or Immortality”
- Pimp my . . . bed?
“After years of catering to women, manufacturers are setting their sights on men. The new macho mattresses they’re introducing have “muscle-recovery properties” and cooling technology, on the theory that men are more likely to feel too hot in bed. The bed frames feature built-in TVs, iPod docking stations, wine coolers, safes and other guy-friendly gadgetry.”
September 23, 2009
A few random links
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QotD: King’s Ransom
I didn’t want to go into detailed technical criticisms of a VERY rough cut of the documentary, but the footage of Gretzky playing is somewhat disappointing. Which is fine; it’s always a little disappointing. I feel like filmmakers should just let us follow him for a whole shift instead of depicting him scoring nifty goals. C’mon, like Gretzky scoring on a breakaway is an appropriate symbol of his gifts? Gretzky sucked on breakaways! That’s right, I put it on the record! We all knew it! Attica! Attica!
Colby Cosh, “Footnotes to today’s Gretzky/ESPN column”, ColbyCosh.com, 2009-09-18
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Swedish military bust-out
Sweden is having some problems with essential parts of their military equipment, specifically the bras issued to female troops:
Flimsy military brassieres are unable to stand up to the strains imposed when female Swedish troops perform “rigorous exercises”, routinely bursting open or even catching fire — so forcing busty young conscripts to hurriedly strip off in the field.
The revelations come courtesy of the Gothenburg Post and English-language Swedish journal The Local. The Post reported yesterday on concerns raised by the Swedish Conscription Council, an organisation concerned with the rights of conscript troops in the Swedish forces.
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Information is data, but data is not information
Wired obtained several hundred pages of information through a Freedom of Information Act query relating to internal surveillance of Americans by the FBI — including information from hotels, car rental agencies, and at least one department store chain:
A fast-growing FBI data-mining system billed as a tool for hunting terrorists is being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and at least one national department store, declassified documents obtained by Wired.com show.
Headquartered in Crystal City, Virginia, just outside Washington, the FBI’s National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) maintains a hodgepodge of data sets packed with more than 1.5 billion government and private-sector records about citizens and foreigners, the documents show, bringing the government closer than ever to implementing the “Total Information Awareness” system first dreamed up by the Pentagon in the days following the Sept. 11 attacks.
Such a system, if successful, would correlate data from scores of different sources to automatically identify terrorists and other threats before they could strike. The FBI is seeking to quadruple the known staff of the program.
The last paragraph needs a bit of analysis . . . because just adding more data won’t “automatically” do any good for domestic security or individual privacy. There was no lack of data on the 9/11 terrorists: if anything, there was too much data. Data is useless until it is corelated with other data to form actual information, a pattern of data that shows something of interest. The various intelligence-gathering arms of the US government already gather lots and lots of data, but they haven’t always been able to turn that collection of raw data into useful information . . . at least, not in a timely fashion.
Opsahl cites a October 2008 National Research Council paper that concluded that data mining is a dangerous and ineffective way to identify potential terrorists, which will inevitably generate false positives that subject innocent citizens to invasive scrutiny by their government.
At the same time, Opsahl admits the NSAC is not at the moment the Orwellian system that TIA would have been.
Those false positives may be enough to disrupt the private lives of many Americans and non-citizen residents, because everyone still has things about them they don’t particularly want to be broadcast to the world. Many employers reconsider their employees who are deemed to be “of interest” to the government, leading to potential loss of employment, diminished opportunities for promotion, or other less obvious but still negative consequences. Having “nothing to hide” is no defence . . . in fact, it may make things tougher — if they don’t find anything obvious, they may decide to dig deeper, creating more disruption.
Of course, things could always be worse: the EU is busy working towards their own Precrime database. (Obscure reference explanation.)
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Watch the collector value of M1 rifles drop now
The South Korean government is planning to sell off its large holdings of M-1 rifles and carbines, according to this BBC News report:
South Korea has come up with a novel way to boost its defence budget — by selling a vast stockpile of old Korean-war rifles to collectors in the US.
The guns were originally sent to Korea as military aid, and some were also used during the war in Vietnam.
For more than five decades, they have been kept mothballed in warehouses.
Most of those on offer are M1 rifles — a weapon once described by US General George S Patton as “the greatest battle-implement ever devised”.
I recall when the Canadian Forces retired the FN C1 rifle . . . the government freaked at the thought of thousands of “assault rifles” being sold to civilians, so they changed the regulations to move the FN into a more restricted category (which most casual gun owners didn’t qualify for).
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Condescending Brits on CanLit
The feathers are well-ruffled in yesterday’s post on In Other Words, as a British judge for the Scotiabank-Giller Prize tries to describe CanLit:
It seems in Canada that you only have to write a novel to get grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and from your provincial Arts Council, who are also thanked. Complaints were once voiced that most shortlisted Giller novels emanated from just three big-name publishers, all owned by Bertelsmann, and that virtually every winner lived in the Toronto area. Now, many of the submitted authors, and their rugged subject matter, hail from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland. That’s maybe because small publishers too are now subsidised, and they proliferate. If you want to get your novel published, be Canadian.
H/T to (yes, this time I’m sure) Chris Taylor, who expects “predictable outrage from hypersensitive arts community in 3..2..1”
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