Digest for Semiological Transcoding

The Old Bailey

Can be found here.

The Boltzmann Brain Problem Explained

Excellent NYT science article here.

Fun Definitions from New York Magazine and H2G2

Stat-Arb: Statistical arbitrage, a.k.a. quantitative trading, a.k.a. "black-box trading." The computerized trading of thousands of stocks based on a set of models manned by "guys with a lot of physics and hardcore statistics backgrounds who come up with ideas about models that might lead to excess return and then they test them and then basically all these models get incorporated into a bigger system that trades stocks in an automated way."

Black Box: The computers that do the trading.

These definitions sounded vaguely familiar to me, and confirmed my long-held suspicion that, not only does life imitate art, but so too does day trading imitate science fiction --

Infinite Improbability Drive (From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy): Finite levels of improbability could easily be generated using an electronic brain and a strong Brownian motion producer (say, a cup of hot tea); yet scientists lacked the means to create a drive that could produce the infinite improbability field required to allow a ship to travel anywhere instantaneously. It was generally concluded that such a drive was virtually impossible.

Eventually, a student (left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party) reasoned that if such a machine were, in fact, a virtual impossibility, then it must also logically be a finite improbability. After working out exactly how improbable, he fed that value into the finite improbability generator, gave it a really hot cup of tea, and managed to generate the infinite improbability generator out of thin air, thus violating the laws of cause and effect. After winning the Galactic Institute's prize for extreme cleverness, he was later lynched by other scientists who had been trying to make the generator for years, and who finally worked out that what they really could not stand was a smartass.

An alternate blogoverse

In the trenches.

GOP Hellmouth

Iowans are gearing up to caucus. There is no better caucus than an informed caucus, especially among Republicans. In the interest of a more perfect Iowa caucus, a description of the views and backgrounds of those contending for the GOP nomination can be found here (by way of more or less obscure references to their counterparts in the buffyverse). Take note, Iowans! And all others!

Bilawal the Taliban Slayer

I have always known him as one of Benazir’s three children, for whom she and I drove around London buying Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic books.

- Mahnaz Malik

Brother Elephant

Once there was a competition between Ganesha and his brother as to see who could circumambulate the three worlds faster and hence win the fruit of knowledge. Skanda went off on a journey to cover the three worlds while Ganesha simply circumambulated his parents. When asked why he did so, he answered that his parents Shiva and Parvati constituted the three worlds and was thus given the fruit of knowledge.

Six Degrees: The Thyssen-IG Farben-Bush-Wolf Blitzer-Mark Siegel-Benazir Bhutto Connection

For those who like the Kevin Bacon game or works by John Guare.

It is much more difficult to see (at least in America) the six degrees of George Walker Bush.

Prescott Bush is an obvious starting point. A popular Connecticut Republican Senator as well as a successful banker, he initially saw an opportunity in supporting Nazi Germany. The Bush family controlled W. A. Harriman & Company and the Union Banking Company, which sold fifty million dollars worth of bonds for Fritz Thyssen, who in turn financed the Nazi party during the lean years of the 1920's.

George Walker, President Bush's great-grandfather, financed the Hamburg-America Line, a shipping concern that is widely acknowledged to have been a front business for I.G. Farben's espionage activity in the United States on behalf of the national socialists in power in Berlin. Farben is better known as the company which produced Zyklon B - the most popular chemical used to kill victims of the holocaust.

Another hidden connection is President Bush's connection to his sister, Robin, who died at three when Bush was seven and her only sibling.

The Bush allegiance to the Saudi regime is common knowledge at this point.

Finally. I submit the following speculation on Bush's connections to Pakistan and the Islamists:

LA Times

Slate

McClatchy

Julien Gracq

Reuters obit here.

Secure in comfort your discomfort purchased

He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft. - James Russell Lowell

Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

The United States Congress ratified the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment on October 21, 1994. The United States is therefore a party to that convention, and therefore has agreed to its definition of torture:

the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

Convention against Torture, art I(1).

Further, the United States, in adopting the Convention against Torture, agreed that "[n]o exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." Convention, art II(2).

In authorizing the use of waterboarding against "Enemy Combatants," in secret interrogation sites around the world, the United States government stands diametrically opposed to its own international commitments under the Convention against Torture. The fact that the interrogation technique is torture is clear. That was clearly the opinion of the United States government in 1947, when it charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for employing the technique against a U.S. civilian during the Second World War. He was convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years hard labor. It is currently the opinion of John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent responsible for capturing and interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, that the technique, used on Zubaydah until he "cracked like an egg," was torture. Kiriakou, however, qualifies this by stating that he felt it was "necessary" at the time, while mentioning in passing that he did not think it was torture at the time and that, so much closer chronologically to 9/11, he was still "angry."

Implicit in the entire Kiriakou story rests the fundamentally flawed policy of allowing the intelligence-gathering function of the CIA and its agents to be eclipsed by a policing function forced upon them by the Bush administration, leading to an environment in which a secret police has effectively been created, with the power to kidnap individuals anywhere in the world, transport them to secret secure locations, and torture them, before transferring them to a secret prison indefinitely, in the interest of our "security." This is a perversion of any sound definition of justice, and security without justice is worthless, a security which explicitly excludes the powerless.

in the context of revelations that CIA operatives videotaped interrogations and subsequently deleted the tapes, such admissions by Kiriakou about the process whereby torture is authorized, with explicit clearance in each instance required of the President himself as head of the NSC, it is relatively easy to connect the dots and see that, despite Michael Hayden's protestations to the contrary, the deletion of the interrogation tapes, no doubt little better than snuff films, constitutes an attempt at a cover-up to protect the entire chain of those complicit in authorizing the procedures. Where there is no exculpatory evidence that a confession of allegiance to Al Qaeda was procured by torture, a sinister circle is completed.