January 18th, 2008
An unmanned spacecraft named Messenger passed within a few thousand miles of Mercury earlier this week, taking photos and measurements of unprecedented quality of which nobody took the time to notice.
The distain showed towards space exploration this week took some of the sting out of Timothy and I being pre-emptively ejected from Tuesday’s Macworld keynote address by Apple CEO, Steve Jobs.
Our foiled plan, in keeping with the long-established decorum and professional practice of the journalistic creedo, was to play keynote bingo.
So there we were, Monday morning with bingo cards, printed up and ready to go in my travel bag, featuring boxes with some predictable phrases and product names that tech journalists and Apple faithful expected to hear during the annual event.
I really, really, wanted to be there early Tuesday morning, if only for the chance to hear someone interrupt a major corporate product launch with the shout of “BINGO!” Credit is due to Robert Smith of NPR for actually playing Candidate Bingo during a recent press conference by NYC Mayor Bloomberg.
But they went unused. In the afterglow of Gizmodo’s prank at the Consumer Electronics Show, where a writer for their website strolled around the conference floor with a little TV zapper, turning off entire banks of LCD displays and leaving Sony’s PR folks blinking back tears of rage, there’s a little more attention being paid to folks requesting media credentials.
The frustrating thing is that we are, despite our unconventional methods, legitimate journalists. This is a real radio station. We cover real, important news topics, backed by factual and entirely verifiable content. The Timothy Jordan Show is not some fly-by-night operation. We’re too busy producing this show to fly by night.
But there we were, Monday morning, Timothy and I, presenting our Press credentials at the registration desk and being told that we weren’t in the system. Well of course we weren’t in the system. Their flawed registration system didn’t have an option for broadcast media. We couldn’t register.
This is radio. How am I supposed to attach a byline to FM radio waves. It’s not as if I can take this little tag and–Oh! There goes one. Damn, missed. Oh! There’s another. Too slow, again. This tag is solid, and that wave… isn’t.
The difference between a particle and a wave did not make an impression on our Press contact at the registration desk early Monday morning. After a brief phone call, which I now suspect that she faked in order to get us off her back, she informed us that we wouldn’t be able to register until 10am the next morning, an hour after the Keynote began.
And then she did the thing that sparked this week’s intro. The thing that has left me quietly fuming all week. Looking right at us, that bloated sack of mottled pasty flesh balled her fists up into her squinty pig-eyes and made the rubbing-away-tears motion, saying, “Oh, I’m sorry we can’t let you in.”
In that moment I was a little more upset about missing the conference keynote. It was only in the hours that followed, as I replayed the event in my mind, that the offense of her behavior began to sink in. We are, after all, legitimate journalists. KZSC may not be the largest radio station in Northern California, and the Timothy Jordan Show brings in a half-half-dozen or so regular listeners, but that did not give her the right to condescend us.
But at least we get more respect than NASA. Our beleaguered space agency, struggling under a miniscule budget to finish building the International Space Station, and keep the Space Shuttle (a chunk of 1970s technology with a million moving parts built by the lowest bidder) from blowing up, while constructing the shuttle’s replacement, maintaining a over a dozen exploration missions around our solar system, and thousands of smaller research programs closer to home.
So why should NASA get more respect? Well, since the agency was founded every taxpayer dollar invested in NASA has yielded an average return of $7. Our entire information technology economy is a by-product of the Apollo moon program. If NASA were allowed to license its research and keep the profits, it would boast a rate of return that would shame most major corporations and investment houses.
Do they get credit? No, they get budget cuts.
At least we don’t get that kind of disrespect. We’re the Timothy Jordan Show News, broadcasting from the hills overlooking Santa Cruz on this 18th of January, ‘08.
• NPR, Candidate Bingo Card PDF (209.1KB)
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How about a group that’s really earned some disrespect? That’d be the IT staff at the White House.
Dedicated listeners may remember the minor scandal six months ago, quickly glossed over in the national media, where we learned that the White House was unable to find nearly ten million email messages sent between ‘01 and ‘05.
In court documents filed earlier this week, White House lawyers admitted that not only were several members of the Executive Office staff allowed to delete email messages from the servers, but that up until October ‘03 the backup tapes were routinely overwritten every three days.
The group currently suing the White House, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), alleges that the White House is actively preventing a Freedom of Information Act request filed by CREW in June of last year. That original request was for full access to an internal report by White House IT staff. They were told in a one-page summary that there were nearly 3,500 document pages relevant to the request. To date they have yet to receive a single one of those pages.
Fast forward to this week’s court filing, where White House lawyers made the bizarre argument that there’s no evidence of missing email messages.
Theresa Payton, Chief Information Officer for the White House, made no mention in her official Declaration to the court of the FOIA summary of 3,500 document pages. She cites, instead, a single chart.
How nearly 3,500 pages turned into a single chart is a little mind-boggling.
To quote Winston Zedmore, “That’s a big twinkie.”
Even more mind boggling is Ms. Payton’s assertion that it’s not clear if email messages are missing to begin with. She told the court that backup tapes made between ‘03-’05 should contain nearly all of the email sent in that time. As the CREW response to her filing states that,
“on multiple occasions to multiple individuals, including as recently as just days ago, the White House has acknowledged that email are missing from White House servers. Ms. Payton’s statements suggesting uncertainty on this point cannot be reconciled with these prior statements, leading inescapably to the conclusion that either Ms. Payton has not testified truthfully to this Court or she testified without full knowledge. ”
Her chance to explain herself may come sooner than she’d like. Rep. Henry Waxman has asked Ms. Payton’s boss, as well as White House Legal Counsel Fred Fielding to testify before the House Oversight Committee on February 15th.
Writing to Mr. Fielding yesterday, Rep. Waxman was just as puzzled by recent statements by the White House that there weren’t any missing emails, particularly since on Sept. 19th of last year the Oversight Committee was shown “a chart indicating that there were 473 days for which various entities in the Executive Office of the President had no archived e-mails.”
He includes a mention that the Council on Environmental Quality had no records of a single email for the 81 days between Nov. 1st, 2003 and Jan. 11th, ‘04.
Actually I can explain that one for Rep. Waxman. There’s no record of any email messages because by then they’d given up. By November of ‘03 the Council on Environmental Quality had learned that nobody in the Bush administration would ever write them back, so they started going to work every day and just kinda spacing out for a few hours.
• Notice of Filing for Ms. Payton PDF (11KB)”
• CREW response to the Jan 16th White House filing PDF (20.9KB)
• Feb 15th Oversight Committee hearing schedule, with invitations to testify
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Oh yeah… the News.
Just so you know, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he discovered more than just the Americas. He may have discovered syphilis, too.
That’s the conclusion of a pre-doc candidate from Emory University. Genetic sequencing by her research group has revealed that the modern form of sexually transmitted syphilis is most closely related to strains that are only present in the Americas.
So the research says that Columbus brought syphilis to Europe? At least that’s what was reported in New Scientist magazine earlier this week. Unfortunately that attention-grabbing headline isn’t completely supported by the research.
While the paper suggests that the case for Columbus discovering syphilis is getting stronger, there simply aren’t enough records of the pre-Columbian Dominican Republic to say that syphilis was present there in a modern form when Columbus and his crews arrived and started making merry with the local women.
It’s possible, though less likely, according to the paper, that along with the host of other diseases endemic among his European counterparts Columbus and his men arrived with a non-venerial form of syphilis that quickly mutated into the modern strain.
It was only after Columbus returned to Spain, and before any other Europeans visited the New World, that the first cases of modern syphilis were recored in Europe.
Ironically, it’s modern health care that may make it impossible to ever find out for certain whether he was responsible. The sub-strain of syphilis present in South America is dying out as governments in the region succeed in their efforts to educate people about STDs. Researchers may soon be left without active cases upon which to make comparisons.
• K. Harper, On the Origin of the Treponematoses: A Phylogenetic Approach
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The General Accountability Office (GAO) actually has been left unable to make a comparison, a comparison between what the Iraqi government claims to be spending on capital infrastructure projects and what’s actually happening.
Remember those benchmarks for the Iraqi government that were all the rage last year? Yeah, nobody else seems to, either.
Properly spending and managing their reconstruction budget was one of those benchmarks. How much progress have they made? Apparently they’ve been so successful that the GAO can’t even assess how much of the $10.1 billion budget has been spent.
Wait, did I say successful?
According to the GAO the U.S. State Department was reporting in July that the Iraqi government had managed to spend nearly a quarter of that $10 billion. That number is, shall we say, wildly off from the 4.4% of its budget that the Iraqi government actually reported spending as of August.
The difference would be $440 million versus $2.4 billion. The U.S. government figures, figures which the Bush administration pointed to as evidence of a benchmark successfully reached, are six times higher than the Iraqi government’s estimates.
Both the State and Treasury departments objected to the GAO’s reporting, saying that Iraqi capital spending is widely spread through the budget and higher than reported. Spread wide enough, apparently, that both agencies then declined to tell the GAO exactly where they believed this spending to be in the Iraqi budget.
A closer look into the Bush administration’s estimates by the GAO revealed that much of what we were told back in July was based not upon Iraqi government records, but rather on reports of funding allocated by local provincial governments. That’s allocated, not necessarily spent, but allocated.
According to the report, some Iraqi provincial reconstruction teams are so behind that they were still trying to spend money allocated the year before because the security situation made it impossible to actually perform any work.
Why is this important?
Well this is the money that’s supposed to make things better for ordinary Iraqis. It’s money for power lines and sewage treatment plants, for irrigation, schools and hospitals, all the things that were neglected by the Hussein government or blown up by ours.
The GAO concludes that the problem isn’t likely to be solved soon because some 40% of the Iraqis with the skills and educational background to perform either the financial, or the infrastructure side of reconstruction have left the country.
• IRAQ RECONSTRUCTION: Better Data Needed to Assess Iraq’s Budget Execution PDF (889.7KB)
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We know that they aren’t headed to work in the U.S. intelligence community.
Displaying his profound lack of understanding about the Internet, the New Yorker reported this week that Director of National Intelligence Mitch McConnell is drafting a new plan that would allow the U.S. government to legally intercept any communications on the internet, at any time.
Past eavesdropping networks, like the long-rumored ECHELON, or the better known cooperation between the NSA and AT&T recently, have been limited in their scale by the simple need to remain obscure.
And that’s the problem with this plan, if it ever turns into more than that. The thing is that the bad guys, the really bad guys, the dangerous ones, the crazies that are capable of bringing down a bridge, or other large-scale terrorism, the really nasty bastards out there already know that the U.S. government is listening.
So aside from the fact that there are exceptionally few crazies that truly dangerous, those same crazies are also already making simple and robust protections against government eavesdropping. Encryption is cheap and easy. The bad guys know this.
It’s not a needle in a haystack that we’re looking for, it’s a fragment of hay in a field of haystacks that’s slightly pointier than all the rest.
Mr. McConnell’s internet haystack scanning network is going to have to look at a lot of straw before it finds any sign of truly dangerous terrorists.
Ordinary Americans are that straw, and if this plays out like the recent news of warrantless wiretapping being diverted from the War on Terror to the War on Drugs, the government will be quite happy to take a closer look at all of us in the name of securing the homeland.
• Raw Story on the New Yorker profile of Mitch McConnell
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The urge to destroy the right to privacy in the name of providing security is exactly why the police aren’t allowed to run the government, usually.
It’s time to wrap things up, but I’d like to give some people credit, for excellence.
People seem to have gotten really excited about the newest Nintendo game system. I really can’t take anything named Wii seriously, but I understand that it’s quite the video game experience.
It’s selling like mad, and people really seem to enjoy it.
An undergrad student at Carnegie Mellon, a guy named Johnny Lee is one of those people. And one of those things that he likes to do in his spare time is to play around with the technology in the system.
One of features of the Wii controller is a motion sensor so that you can do things by waving the remote around.
They’ve come up with some unique games, like tennis and bowling.
What Johnny Lee has done is come up with head tracking system using the game’s remote controller. It’s a head tracking system that creates 3D on your TV screen.
That virtual 3D that he’s created you can see youtube, linked on this evening’s post of the News segment at timothyjordanshow.com.
• Johnny Lee’s Wii projects page
Editor’s note: The News staff escaped before we could force them to finish transcribing the News. The audio is available via podcast