The Tip Of The Plank

Mr. Bush and his cohort are at the tip of the plank. They can walk no farther.

They have inserted the U.S. into a conflict that has been simmering for a thousand years. Presuming that only a win was possible, they used torture techniques worse than the Nazi leaders who were sentenced to death for torture at Nuremberg. They dare not now admit a loss.

So they must keep us there.

A fearful, antagonistic Iran is arming itself in anticipation of having to deal with the US aircraft carriers sitting in the Persian Gulf. We could bomb them. We could hurt them. But our troops could not secure their ground.

We demonstrate repeatedly that our modern hi-tech military is no match for low-tech garage-mechanic roadside bombs. Is a win ever possible against a population made resolute by torture?

The Iraq government is less stable day by day, unable to pass the oil exploitation agreement we were hoping to force on them. The Green Zone, in which we hoped to nurture our new friendship, is more and more frequently coming under bombardment. The supply lines for our presence there are increasingly frayed. Ever so slowly, our empire is crumbling into dust.

Would we have won the war if we hadn't tortured people?

Some Moore's Law Corollaries

Computing bang for the buck doubles every two years. That's a Moore's Law corollary. What is called "Moore's Law" today was presented simply as an observation in a paper by Dr. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, back in 1965. The doubling he observed then has occurred for over forty years, and his observation is called a law today.

Perhaps some underlying natural phenomenon drives this process. Perhaps the observation was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps Moore's Law is a projection of the ever-quickening advance of technology. Whatever its cause, it continues.

Moore expressed his idea in hard physical terms. For a silicon chip of a given size, the number of transistors that can be put on it doubles every eighteen months on the average, he wrote. This doubling rate was later corrected to every two years. Since then it has remained constant.

Several nice things happen when transistors get more numerous in the same space.

First, they get smaller. This follows naturally. The smallness of the transistors on the chip allow products that contain them to get smaller. A computing gadget of today, like a USB WiFi adapter, is likely to be half the size it was two years ago.

Second, transistors get cheaper. Half the cost. The cost of a USB adapter is becoming trivial. Poor people can more and more easily afford to explore computer literacy.

Third, smaller transistors use less power. A computer that would have required an 80 watt power supply years ago can be powered today by a crank that charges a little battery. Computers can go places that power lines don't.

Fourth, transistors get twice as fast when they shrink to half size. As they get faster, more communications bandwidth becomes available and the cost of bandwidth decreases.

This increase in bandwidth happens at about triple the rate of the Moore's Law increase, according to observer George Gilder. Ever faster connections can be delivered ever more cheaply to the ever growing hordes of new computer users. Whether the market for new computers that connect to the web will eventually saturate is unclear. Gilder makes the point that as the cost of connection becomes trivial, data flow becomes free.

The cost of hard drives, optical drives, and even of blank cds and dvds seems also to follow the downward spiral.

As both data storage and the ability to move it from place to place become cheaper and cheaper, data disperses. Data wants to be free. A blank cd used to cost a dollar, and it had to hold something important. Today, a blank cd costs ten cents and can hold near-trivia, yet still be worth its cost.

One network theory (Metcalf) explains that every time a new node is added to a network - like a computer being added to a LAN or a new site appearing on the web - then all the other nodes on that network can link to it, and the whole network is enriched.

A network of [n] nodes has [n(n-1) / 2] possible links. Its potential for connectivity - and therefore its potential utility - increases as the square of an increase in the number of nodes. Triple the membership in your social club and you'll have nine times the fun. (With three times as many members, each member will have three times the fun. If they all get along together.)

If all those transistors on Moore's chip can be connected together, as in a "System on Chip", or SoC, then, as their quantity doubles, the systems that can be built on them take ever longer (and cost ever more) to design. Compound complexity raises its ugly head. The Master Plan develops too many bells and whistles.

Eventually we may learn how to let problems define for themselves the sort of system they need for their solution. Just throw ten billion transistors at a problem and let them sort themselves out. This works for life forms; it may work for digital forms as well.

What if the transistors, instead of increasing in count, got smarter and smarter? Suppose they learned how to network and swap jokes? Faced with a shared problem, would they develop specialties? Would they form cliques and develop political leanings? Would they discover primary guiding principles for developing real-world solutions, the closest that machines can ever come to the spiritual?

Is "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" a computable result?

One may know sooner than one thinks.

The Age of Transparency

"I can see clearly now, the rain has gone..." goes the song. These days, the more we look, the better we can see. And look we do.

Monica Goodling's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee was not being broadcast on CSPAN1 or CSPAN2 the other day, so I went online to the Committee's web site and watched it there. They broadcast it live.

A person has only to look.


For decades, computing bang for the buck has doubled every two years. A man named Moore noticed this long ago, and the effect was promptly named "Moore's Law". For shy transgressors who hope to hide their faces from the sun forever, Moore's Law makes the light grow ever brighter.

Moore's Law has helped our cellphones evolve simultaneously into leashes and tools of liberation.

Our cellphones follow us everywhere. For those few of us who matter, the powers that be can triangulate between cell towers to pinpoint our location, even when our phones have been turned off. Triangulation recently located the mother of a would-be transplant recipient at a concert and found her in time for his operation. Yay for our government, the heroes...

Oh-oh. A quick dip into Google reveals that a friend's (or enemy's) cellphone may now let them locate cellphone numbers they put in their phonebook. Anyone can be big brother. And this was true four years ago, two Moore's Law doublings back

Another side of the leash was displayed recently when a court case used evidence obtained by a spy program that the FBI had downloaded remotely into a mobster's cellphone which turned it into a room listening device. A guy was bugged by his own cellphone. (From Politech, who has more here.)

Any conversation with anyone who has a cellphone in their pocket that still has a battery in it can now be remotely and secretly recorded. All ordinary conversation - what was said and where it was said - are now potentially a matter of record.

All conversation is public.


What we say can be recorded by the government at almost no cost, scanned electronically for interesting words and phrases, and referred for further processing. If you say things like "Did you get the igniter for the charcoal?" or "Does everybody have ammo for their, uh, squirt guns?" - fishy stuff like that - the government is sure to get you.

Does Igpay Atinlay ukfup NSA? If human beings ever got the idea that their conversations were being monitored, they would revert to nuance and secret languages. For example, "I've got six dozen of the ceremonial candles. Shall I load the candlebra?" or "Yes, we have the cake mix. Should we add the cherries to the cake?" But fortunately, evil people are too stupid to realize that their phones might be monitored. That's the current thinking.

So we all become vanilla. The goal of the exercise is not our security but our conformity.

At the same time that cell phones make us vulnerable, however, they also make us strong.

Cell phones around the world are now poised to photograph anything newsworthy and upload it for global viewing. Police tasered a student who wouldn't show his library card; their violence was captured by cellphones. Two days later, it was all over the news. Tasers can kill. Oops.

Cellphones are the eyes of the world. It can only get better. Doubling every two years.


The NSA and CIA themselves stand out like sore thumbs in a world that is increasingly titillated by the secret and corrupt. Interesting stories can be told, and surely they are now being written. Secrecy practically guarantees corruption, so there may be many marketable stories in the hidden city.

Newt Gingrich, in preparation for a run for the Presidency, has revealed that even as he excoriated Bill Clinton for dallying with an intern, he was himself cheating on his wife. Trying to get a lead on his detractors, he would appear to be. Running scared of the Age of Transparency, he is.

Rudy Giuliani was once photographed in drag. Several times. He's running for president, and the photos are everywhere. Embarrassing for Republicans trying to one-up each other in kowtowing to imagined ultra-right litmus tests is that this exposure of Giuliani's sorta-gay side hasn't hurt him in the polls a bit.

Meanwhile, thanks to all the bad news, the Republican Party has just fired its telephone fundraisers. The process is a waste. Small contributions are drying up. Republican voters know too much about their party. Let the Daddy Warbucks types fund the party, they say, and stop bothering Grandpa.

General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the other day made it abundantly clear that he has no idea how many soldiers have been killed in Iraq. He did not know that more soldiers have died there - 3400 - than civilians died here on 9/11. What else does he not know?

A political posture that denies a known reality in this blooming Age of Transparency risks sooner or later foundering on its own foolishness.