Airport Security

I wrote this at the airport last Saturday, and finally got around to posting it.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a terminal at Houston George Bush International Airport. I usually tune out the assorted generic announcements that come over the intercom about security and unattended bags because I’ve heard them all before. Some of them may come off as a bit Orwellian, but I think it’s perfectly reasonable that we be alert for suspicious behavior and refuse to take bags from strangers. What made me sit up and listen today was an announcement that I had never heard before. It may be that this particular warning is unique to Houston, or it may be a new addition to the security warning script. The announcement that struck me was a warning that “inappropriate” jokes and remarks about airport security may result in arrest. I’m not surprised really, because intelligent people have avoided making jokes about airport terrorism for at least the last ten years. There was something about the disembodied voice that really drove it home: our right to free speech is being abridged. I don’t think making jokes about airport security is a case of shouting fire in a movie theater. I think this is another case of security theater. For those unfamiliar with the term, “security theater” is the derogatory name given to the assorted security regulations that have been enacted more for show than effect. Things like removing shoes at security checkpoints and limits on fluids in carry-ons are security theater. They are reactive rather than proactive and they promote inconvenience more than they promote security. I don’t deny that there are people who want to commit horrible crimes on planes and using planes as weapons, and I agree that we need to do what we can to prevent such crimes. What I object to are policies that are expensive, intrusive, and ineffective.

We need to accept that we can’t stop all crime, and that includes terrorism. There’s a certain baseline level that we just need to live with, as hard as that is. We need to punish the perpetrators, and we need to prevent terrorism where we reasonably can, but the post-9/11 notion that we can “beat” terrorism or “end” terrorism is as deluded as hoping to prevent all murder and theft. As a society, we need to accept that there are bad people, and those bad people introduce a certain level of danger. Looked at history, our present level of danger is trivial. For eons, all of humanity has lived in fear that a rival tribe would ride in over the hills and burn the village to the ground. That we have reduced that possibility to something rare and extraordinary is an accomplishment, and we shouldn’t lose sight of how significant that is.

We made a mistake declaring war on terrorism, because terrorism is not an enemy state; terrorism is crime. Terrorists are murderers that operate on a grand scale, and we should pursue them and treat them as criminals. To do otherwise legitimizes terrorism and validates terrorists. Terrorists are criminals. We should arrest those we can, try them for their crimes, and punish them. We have a system of criminal justice for this reason, and I cannot understand why we let the military usurp its authority. In the cases of other nations sponsoring terrorism, as Afghanistan did, or other quasi-nations sponsoring terrorism, as is happening in Somalia, there is a case for military intervention. However tempting, I think nation-building is a mistake. Destroy the threat and get out. Make it clear that we will cause irrevocable harm to our enemies, but don’t get caught up with turning them into our allies.

This brings me back to the topic of airport security. The system we have now is showy and somewhat effective, but it is incredibly inconvenient and encroaches on the freedoms of airline passengers. We need to create a system that is effective, rather than a system that looks good. We should implement more behavioral and demographic profiling. The fact is that very few terrorists are young mothers with babies. Very few terrorists are old men with replacement hips. Will there be people who abuse this? Certainly. There are people who will go to any length to hurt others, including employing young mothers and old men as suicide bombers. But back to my first point, we need to accept that the staggering, overwhelming majority of terrorists are not going to these lengths, and the staggering, overwhelming majority of young mothers are not terrorists. In addition to demographic profiling, we should implement more behavioral profiling. Train check-in agents and airport personnel to identify suspicious behavior, and then track those individuals with more scrutiny. I guess what I’m getting at is stop using a one-size-fits-all approach to security and start focusing our attention and energy on those most likely to harm us.

I would be remiss if I didn’t make a comment about the full-body scanners recently installed at security checkpoints in several airports. When I first heard about these, I was excited because I imagined they would make security go faster. Finally, we could keep our belts on and our coins in our pockets! I was wrong. For whatever reason, these scanners are used in the same manner as the metal detectors they’re replacing, except slower. Not only do you have to remove your belt, your pocket change, and your cell phone, but you also need to empty your pockets of non-metallic items like your wallet. Then you need to stand still in the middle of the machine while it scans you, a process that is slower than striding through a metal detector. Since these machines are slower and more intrusive than metal detectors, the only justification for them is that they make us safer than metal detectors. The question is, do we care about being that safe? Do we want to give up assorted conveniences and freedoms in exchange for a marginal increase in security? Are the returns worth the cost? As I argued above, there is a certain level of terrorism that is so costly to prevent that we have no choice but to accept it. I think these scanners, as they are currently implemented, cost too much in time, inconvenience, and offended citizens to be worth the marginal security gains they afford us. I think that we should continue to employ scanners, but not as a replacement for metal detectors. I think they should be a voluntary option for individuals with piercings, prosthetics, or metallic clothing who cannot go through a metal detector. These individuals would otherwise be required to select a pat-down, and that’s excessive. I should also note that there’s some evidence that the backscatter x-ray technology used in some of these scanners may not be safe. The jury is still out on backscatter, but there is a safe (non-ionizing) alternative in the form of millimeter-wave RF scanners, which have also been employed by the TSA in the same role as the backscatter scanners. The prudent thing to do would be to use only the millimeter-wave devices, if only to quiet the naysayers.

Dylan Ratigan is Mad as Hell

This clip has been making the rounds on the internet for the past few days. I first saw it on Reddit, and then one of my friends showed it to me on Facebook. I can see why he thought it would interest me, given my distaste with our government lately. Ratigan makes some good points here, and I’d love to see some of these things come to pass, but ultimately, I think that people like him and rants like this are part of the problem.

Ratigan makes it very clear that he’s angry with the government, but that’s hardly novel. The Tea Party was doing it last summer already. At this point, everyone with their head screwed on straight knows that our government is a mess, that our economy is a mess, and that our country is a mess. Congress’s approval rates are in the teens. Dylan Ratigan is mad; I’m mad too. In a way, I was pleased to see someone in a position of power finally say something about the problem (and don’t tell me that hosting a cables news show isn’t a position of power). It galls me that Barack Obama can come out of what happened two weeks ago and call the debt ceiling “compromise” a victory for anything but political hostage-taking. I am often outraged by the things the media choose to report on. I agree that we have all been too silent for too long about the problems, even though we all know they exist.

The thing is, yelling doesn’t solve the problems. We can be mad as hell, but it won’t create jobs, fix our roads, or shake our government out of the partisan deadlock. If anything, the rise of the Tea Party has made our government even more dysfunctional than it was. They yelled and screamed and got elected, and now that they’re in office, they pledge to do whatever it takes to prevent anyone else from getting what they want. More yelling and screaming is hardly going to improve the situation. I really do hate the deal we struck to raise the debt ceiling, but I am glad we struck a deal. If the left had been as obstinate as the far right, who knows where we would be?

The fact remains that something must be done. Ratigan seems to think the President can do it.

I would like him to go to the people of the United States of America and say, “People of the United States of America, your Congress is bought, your Congress is incapable of making legislation on healthcare, banking, trade, or taxes because if they do it, they will lose their political funding and they won’t do it. But I’m the President of the United States, and I won’t have a country that is run by a bought Congress. So I’m not going to work with a bought Congress and try to be Mr. Big Guy, ‘I’m working with a bought Congress’, I’m going to abandon the bought Congress like Teddy Roosevelt did

There are a few problems with this idea, and the first is that it plays right into the hands of those who oppose him. The Republican Party has spent the last three years trying to paint Obama as a dangerous socialist with Hitler-esque dreams of fascist rule. These amusingly contradictory accusations have been surprisingly effective, especially when you consider that Obama hasn’t even done half of the things they accuse him of (raise taxes, etc). If he were to stand up and declare himself independent of Congress, all of these people would be vindicated. The Hitler references would flow like cheap beer at a frat party. All of the Constitution-hugging Tea Party types would decry his skewering of the separation of powers, and they would be right for a change.

Ratigan is partly right about one thing: the “bought Congress.” Of course, it’s the “partly” that makes things complicated. The fact is that in today’s world, it’s extraordinarily expensive to mount an effective political campaign. To some degree it always has been, and that’s one of the reasons political parties exist. The necessity of TV advertising has made the price tag all the more ludicrous. In order to run for national office, one must amass millions of dollars. Unless one is a multimillionaire, this presents a problem, so candidates take donations. They take donations from individuals, corporations, and special interest groups. Special interest groups, the much-maligned forces of evil that run our country, aren’t all bad. A lot of them are just groups of people who got together behind a common goal and petitioned the government, which is what democracy is supposed to be about. The Sierra Club, the NRA, and the AARP are special interest groups. So are assorted business consortiums and unions. So are the people who want to eliminate government corruption. Special interest groups can espouse things that are good, bad, or neither. They are not the problem. The problem is that money talks in ways that votes don’t, because you can’t get votes without money to pay for the TV commercials and campaign advisors and tour buses. The problem is the massive monetary hurdle, because until and unless we find some way to lower it or remove it, candidates will always be beholden to donors. I freely admit that I do not know how to accomplish this, but I believe it to be the only way to remove the power money has over policy. As long as campaign fundraising is more important than actual issues, we have a problem.

Back to Ratigan’s rant, let’s imagine that Obama did what he proposes. Imagine Obama went on TV and told us our Congress is bought. What happens next? Ratigan doesn’t seem to know. He proposes an infrastructure bank, something I strongly support as a way not only to address our infrastructure projects, but reduce earmarks by taking the decision out of the hands of Congress. But who authorizes this infrastructure bank? Obama just said he won’t work with the “bought Congress,” but they hold the purse strings. A large caucus of Congress has made it their goal to oppose everything that comes out of Barack Obama’s mouth, even if they would have agreed with it otherwise. Calling them a bunch of crooks is hardly going to make them more likely to sign onto his plans.

Ratigan’s proposal is so reeking of socialism that even I’m a bit wary. I find it hard to believe that Americans “will have no issue when I incorporate an infrastructure bank that I fund with repatriated offshore money that I bring in and then use to create 2% direct lending to every business in America because when you realize that the banking system is fully corrupt and defrauding us.” Whether the banking system is “fully corrupt and defrauding us” is a matter for people more intelligent than I, but what Ratigan’s proposing here looks like replacing a big chunk of the banking industry with a government lending agency, funded by repatriated offshore funds. My first question is how you repatriate those offshore funds. Second, if you can find a legal way to do it, how does this affect the businesses that currently hold the funds? It’s all well and good to grab our torches and loot the businesses, but in the end, a lot of us work for the businesses, so maybe burning them to the ground isn’t a good idea. That said, I definitely agree that our tax code makes it far too easy for a multinational to keep funds and assets overseas and avoid taxes. We need a tax code that acknowledges and works with the modern global economy, but we can’t institute it overnight.

I am disappointed in Obama, and I know I’m not the only one. Although many commentators have scolded the “radical left” for expecting more from the President, he ran on a platform of hope and change. I know that I won’t get the government I want, not from him or any other likely candidate. We didn’t expect him to be a socialist, but when I think of hope and change, I think of New Deals and Great Societies. We got neither. It must be said, though, that he accomplished a lot. America is not ready for universal healthcare, but I think that the reforms passed two years ago will make a positive difference for a lot of people. His economic policies, though timid, did stave off a truly painful depression. He may have taken his time in getting there, but he has made great progress on rights for gays in and out of the military. Most recently, his Secretary of Education announced a policy that ends the most asinine part of No Child Left Behind. Most of the things that Barack Obama hasn’t accomplished (ending the Bush tax cuts, proper Keynesian spending, employment programs, environmental legislation, tax reform, making Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare more sustainable), he has failed to accomplish because Congress has no interest in them or actively opposes them.

Obama’s great failing is in controlling his message and bargaining with his opponents. I don’t know why he has proven so bad at controlling his message, but he consistently fails to frame the debate. He doesn’t get out ahead of the issues (at least not since healthcare), and he doesn’t inspire. He lets the other side paint him as something he isn’t, and finds himself cornered because they control the debate. He fails in bargaining because he wants to be post-partisan. He wants to come to the bargaining table in good faith with an offer that he thinks is fair to both sides. Unfortunately, the Republicans still consider him a Democrat, and they take his “fair offer” as the opening bid in a haggling session. This is how we got tax cut extensions and debt ceiling showdowns. This is how we ended up with a healthcare reform bill that did not even include a public option. I would love to see Barack Obama engage the American people and rally them behind things that I think are important, and I sense that’s what Dylan Ratigan wants. I just don’t know how he’ll do it.

The fact is that we all know there are problems. What we don’t know, or can’t agree on, are the solutions. We cannot forget that a big part of the country doesn’t want to see taxes go up, even if it’s to pay down the debt. We cannot forget that a big part of the country wants a smaller government. They have votes too. I won’t get the government that I want. What kills me is that there are things that all of us want, or at least most of us, and they die a quiet death while we fight over the things we can’t agree on.

God Damn am I Awesome

I just want to point out that I really love the layout and typography I picked here.
It makes me happy.
Georgia is a superior font, so shut up Brandon.

On the United States (and Government)

I was going to put more in here, but it was getting long, and I've been picking it up and putting it down for a week and a half now, so I guess it's time to post it.

A couple of weeks ago, I made a melodramatic post on Facebook about the United States falling from greatness. It provoked an interesting discussion about whether the United States was actually falling from greatness and about my political views in general. I wrote some things there that I’ve wanted to write for a long time, and they deserve further exploration.

I’ll start by clarifying my original statement -- the United States of America is no longer a great nation. When I said this, I did not mean that the United States is no longer a world power, or that the United States is spiraling into oblivion and we’re all going to die. What I meant was that we can no longer claim to be exceptional. Whether we ever were exceptional is a debate for another day, but many Americans certainly believe that our nation is exceptional. To claim otherwise is considered at the very least unpatriotic. I don’t think that acknowledging reality is unpatriotic; I think it’s healthier to examine the problems with our country than to hide behind the flag.

I didn’t rush into making this gloomy pronouncement (I’ve been thinking about it for several months), and I don’t think the country is beyond saving. What finally broke me down is that no one seems interested in saving the country (or the world, for that matter); no one seems interested in building a better future. A large part of the country is paralyzed or apathetic. How many people even care what is going on in Washington? Unemployment has been hovering around 9% for two years now. The polls say that this bothers people, but I don’t see them taking to the streets, and I don’t see them voting for politicians who want to create jobs.

Of course, there is a large part of the country that is misled and misrepresented. As wealth becomes more and more concentrated in a small group of elite individuals, the interests of rich people and large corporations gain an ever-larger say in our government. Corporate interests clothe themselves in populism and convince the middle class to support the policies that screw the middle class. The Tea Party is composed primarily of people who are scared or pissed off, just like I am. The difference is that they were listening to different propaganda than I was. My propaganda told me that good government can make the world a better place (more on good government later). Their propaganda told them that bad government was making the world a worse place. Both of these statements are true, but they inspire different conclusions and different actions.

The Tea Party determined that if bad government is hurting society, then less government would be a good thing. What they didn’t consider is the cost of hacking the guts out of the government. I agree that there’s a lot of waste in our government, but I don’t think it’s as much as the current furor suggests. I think that in our haste to cut big numbers, we’re going to cut some programs that do a lot of good. The states are in dire straits financially, and many of them have cut Medicaid eligibility to draconian levels. In spite of this, the federal government stands poised to reduce its share of Medicaid payments. I believe in Medicaid. After my grandpa had a stroke in 2000, we couldn’t have afforded the nursing home he lived in or the medical care he needed. After we sold his house and his car, Medicaid was the only thing that paid those bills. I don’t know what would have happened to my family without Medicaid, but I believe that programs like that need to exist. This is just one example of programs that are in danger because we’re so wrapped up in cutting the size of our government.

I don’t think that big government is necessarily a bad thing. Our history is full of great projects that were planned, executed, or at least paid for by the government. They include infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal, the railroads (paid for by government land), the dams and levees that turned the Mississippi Valley into agricultural land, the ports that allow us to trade with the world, the highway system, the bridges and tunnels across our rivers, and even the sewers. The scientific discoveries made possible by federal funding are far too numerous to name, but government research paved the way for everything from vaccines to the Internet.

Personally, I'd like to see real tax reform, not just “tax reform” as a euphemism for deeper cuts to our already historically low tax rate. I'd like to see a realistic plan to make Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security sustainable without cutting benefits. I'd like to see universal health care, because I think it is morally right, but also because I think it is the only way to constrain our ballooning healthcare costs. I'd like to see a real investment in our transportation infrastructure, our electrical grid, and our communications networks, because our infrastructure was once the envy of the world, and is no longer. I want to see cities -- beautiful, clean cities that leverage modern technology and city planning to minimize traffic congestion and maximize productivity and livability. I want to see poverty and hunger eradicated, something that we could easily do if not for the economic forces that keep us from reaching our agricultural potential. I want to see our education system improved in a meaningful way, which doesn't necessarily mean more college graduates, but high school graduates who are prepared for the work force. I'd like to see a smaller military, and I would support a constitutional amendment requiring selective service to be activated in time of war. Basically I'm saying that we shouldn't go to war without a draft. Maybe if we took wars seriously, we would consider them seriously before committing to them.

While I'm on the topic of amendments, I think Obamacare's mandate is unconstitutional, but it is necessary for other provisions of the program (such as preventing discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions). I think that Roe v. Wade is a mockery of the judicial process. Fortunately, we have a process to change the Constitution. That process exists because the founding fathers were smart people and they knew that one document could not possibly stand the test of time. The amendment process is almost never used for practical purposes. Instead, it is used so a group can make a stand about a principle without facing the ramifications of an actual law being enacted. Some examples include the flag-burning amendment, assorted gay marriage amendments, and the latest, a balanced budget amendment. I suspect that the architects of these bills know how disastrous or unpopular they would be. Rather than enact a law, they just propose an amendment, which looks like a stronger stand than a law, but comes with the protection of being incredibly unlikely to pass and then be ratified. I'm tired of the government punting on the big choices.

I should point out that my political philosophy changes constantly, and that this post doesn't begin to encompass all of it, even as it exists right now. I fear that our belief in our own exceptionalism has sealed our fate. This nation became what it is because we worked our asses off to get here. We didn’t accept what we had as good enough, and we didn’t muddle through. We innovated, we pushed, we shoved, we changed things. Sometimes the changes were improvements. Sometimes the changes had unintended consequences that we had to rectify later (see The Gilded Age). I think we are currently experiencing the latter situation. Over the twentieth century, we revamped our government into a larger, more modern form. We have not perfected the formulas and policies that allow us to have modern government institutions like Social Security, Medicare, and other social welfare programs. We also went through a transformation of the economy from a regional or national thing to something that spans the world. We haven’t finished refining our policies to reflect this reality, and the failings of those policies is what caused the current recession. Rather than throw up our hands and give up on modern government, we need to keep trying. We need to keep pushing and experimenting to streamline our government, not by cutting out important parts of it, but by fixing the things that don’t work. Not everything that is popular is smart, and not everything that is smart is popular. Our leaders need to remember this.

Heatstroke and Hiking

It's been three weeks since my last post here. I'd say that's a lot better than the four-month gap the preceded it. I was going to write something a couple weeks ago about politics but I couldn't actually come up with something to say.

I suppose the main reason I haven't posted anything is that I haven't been doing much of interest. I got Civilization IV and all of the expansion packs when they were on sale on Steam last week, so there's that. I finished season 3 of Doctor Who today. I'll be sad when I run out of Tennant, because Smith looks like such a tool. Seeing as I titled this post already, I guess I should get to the story that it refers to. This past Saturday, I decided to actually do something. There's a city park about forty minutes' walk away called Walnut Creek, and I decided to go and do some hiking, maybe take a few pictures. What I did not do was check the weather.

I headed out at 11 in the morning and stopped at Taco Deli for lunch on the way. At the risk of food-blogging, I'm going to say the place is amazing. People have been telling me to go there essentially since I got here, and now I know why. I had a Frontera Fundido Sirloin taco and a Mexico City Chicken taco. They were fantastic. Having eaten my tacos, I pressed on, stopping at a gas station to grab another liter of water (I was only carrying 20 oz). I knew it was going to be hot, and I'm not dumb enough to go walking or hiking without a lot of water in Texas.

In other news, there are watermelons growing in this retention basin that I passed along the way.

I got to the park with most of my water intact and picked a trail. The trails were all very clearly marked and there were signs pointing to the parking lots at most of the branches, so I just sort of wandered for a while.

I'm going to break up the narrative here to point out that Blogger's formatting is terrible and my hasty attempts to fix it in the HTML editor are being rejected. Grr.

Somewhere around here a lizard ran across the trail. I couldn't get a picture of him.

I should point out that all of these pictures were taken with my phone. While it has a pretty capable camera (for a phone), the ergonomics suck and there's no viewfinder (which means I was shooting almost blind because of the bright sun). Because of all of these excuses, my pictures aren't all that great, but I'd say they're on the higher end for phone pics.
Also, sidenote to owners of Droid Incredibles: the auto exposure setting is terrible and will always pick too slow a shutter speed. I've had better results since I set my ISO setting to 400. With the sensitivity thusly jammed in place, it behaves more like a camera and less like a camera phone.

After scrambling down this, I was almost to the creek. I have to say: I've missed hiking. I really enjoyed the couple of little drops I had to negotiate and all the ground I covered (probably about two or three miles in the park and four miles each way on the road.)

 

And here's the creek, or what's left of it. You can see that it's been a bit dry lately. From what I understand, the water level is always up and down with the seasons, but we're in the middle of the drought, and there was almost nothing left.

I don't think I can say I've ever stood in a dry creek bed before. It was kind of cool. This was not an insignificant creek either. I'd say it was about as wide as the Raritan is along river road, and maybe deeper when it's filled (I've waded the Raritan, and I don't know if I could have waded this).

Down in the creek bed, near one of the remaining pools of water were three very large, black birds. When I got closer they took off and landed in a nearby tree. To give you an idea of the size of these things, I heard a whoosh from the drown-draft each time they beat their wings. Some research on the internet has led me to conclude that they were black vultures. Here's one of my pictures:

After that I just kept walking. I explored a smaller stream, then climbed up out of the creek bed.

Eventually I found myself at the trailhead for the waterfall crossing, so I followed it to the waterfall.

The cactus should have tipped me off to what was coming.

Oh look. A waterfall.

If anyone was ever wondering what a waterfall looks like without the water, there it is. It's just a cliff.

Powerlines, for those who like such things.

I was now starting to run low on water. I had come in with a liter and a half, but I was seriously starting to exhaust that supply. I started to follow signs back to the parking lot (and water fountains).

Unfortunately, I was there^^^. (Actually, I was a bit further back when I decided it was time to return to a water source.) Because this whole alternating pictures and narrative things is getting tiresome, I'm going to just continue the story and dump the pictures at the end of the post. I finally made it back to the parking lot, where I promptly sat down in the shade for about ten minutes to cool off. I wasn't close to dehydration, but I was flirting with something new: heatstroke. I'm no stranger to dehydration. I can feel it coming and I know how to avoid it. Hell, I'd brought a liter and a half of water. This was new. The combination of 105° heat and six miles of walking had me just about exhausted. After resting a while and refilling my water bottles, I felt well enough to press on. It was definitely time to head back home. I consulted Google maps quickly and started on my way. What I didn't realize is how much hotter it had gotten since my walk there. I had a long walk along hot roads back home. Fortunately, I was now in the middle of civilization. I had passed a McDonalds along the way, and I decided I would stop there on the way back. By the time I got there, I was exhausted, runnign out of water, and overheating. I ate a burger and fries (I suspect I was starting to run low on electrolytes at this point...), drank a soda, and refilled my water. Most importantly, I vented a few kilojoules of heat into the air conditioned room. Feel much better, I headed out. The rest of the walk was relatively uneventful, aside from having to stop every ten minutes or so in the shade to cool off. Eventually I got back and immediately got in the shower and just sat for a bit. I don't know what my milage in the park was, but I went about nine miles on the road. I'd consumed over four liters of water and twenty ounces of soda, but I was still dehydrated. Apparently Texas is hot. A couple of things that I've noticed around here lately:

• Homeless people. Seems like I've seen quite a few vagrant/migrant-looking people around here. The two I saw on Saturday were the classic, carrying-a-sign-at-an-intersection variety, but there are also just a lot of really scruffy looking dudes walking along the road. I dunno if they're homeless or just scruffy guys who like walking.
• Lawns. Here we are in the middle of a historic drought, and people have sprinklers on their lawns. Their idea of water restrictions around here are "you can only water your lawn two days a week." The reality is you probably shouldn't be trying to grow grass around here.
• Gated communities. There are a lot of these. Not developments, but gated apartment communities. Mine doesn't have a gate, but it might as well.

And now, pictures (in reverse chronological order):

This is the ramp going down to the river under the street and the sidewalk going off into the woods. I may explore this at some point.

Creek bed from above.

Looking the other way.

Creek bed (same as above, but at ground level).

Looking the other way.

Looking out of the creek at the tail ahead.

Creek bed.

More creek bed.

Powerlines and a trail. I should note that all the trails were very well-packed and some of them were rather wide. This place is good for biking, judging by the tracks I saw and the bikers I passed.

Lots of power lines.

Trail shot.

Below the waterfall.

Looking toward the waterfall from the top.

Top of the waterfall.

Mysterious hose hanging down into the creek. It was tied around a tree at one end.

Fish in what remains of the creek.

I think this is posted above, but I wanted to point out that this is a stream. I was walking in it.

This fetid pool used to be a creek, or so I'm told.

Vulture in a tree.

Vulture landing in a tree.

Fallout 3 reference.

Internship: Week One (Continued)

In which I actually go to work.

I refuse to actually read the previous post, because I'm sure I was word-vomiting like a fifteen year-old girl with a Xanga. Maybe I'll get back into the swing of writing and create something approaching prose.

At any rate, I said I would continue the saga of week one. I left out that on Sunday we walked to all three entrances of National Instruments, attempting to scout out the best way in on our first day. At all three, we found eight foot tall gates with ID scanners. As none of us had IDs yet, this presented something of a problem. Fast-forward to Monday morning, and all the gates are wide open; one less thing to worry about. National Instruments hired 220 interns this summer, and 88 of them started that day, so there were quite a few of us. We got ID badge photos taken and were shepherded off to breakfast with our mentors/managers. My mentor's name is Mark, and he seems like a pretty swell guy. He (and a lot of NI) seems pretty young, probably under thirty. He told me (finally) what group I would be working with--PXI. Essentially, PXI is a modular instrument system consisting of a PC motherboard (controller) and a series of instrument modules communicating to the controller over PCI (now PCIe), just like expansion cards in a desktop computer.

After meeting Mark, I was put back into the general population of interns for orientation. As you can imagine, this was a bunch of PowerPoint presentations and forms and a tour--nothing exciting. After being oriented, we were reunited with our mentors for lunch. Mark, a two other guys from the group, and I went out to a burrito place across the highway called Freebirds. It's a chain that apparently started in California. Imagine Qdoba or Chipotle, but with bigger burritos and they serve beer. The pork burrito I had was pretty good, but oddly cylindrical.

After lunch, it was time for something new and exciting: LabVIEW training. (This is not actually exciting.) I've been programming in LabVIEW for almost three years now, and I probably had more experience going into training than anyone else in the room except for the instructor. Needless to say, day one of training was wasted on me. They let us out of training around 4:30 so we could go back and set up our computers and whatnot. I went back up to my cubicle to find that my computer would be an actual PXI chassis, which is kind of cool. It's got more horsepower than any desktop they could have scrounged up for me (~Core i7 at 1.7Ghz). I started setting things up, then finally got out at around six, making for a ten hour day.

When I got home, we went on another shopping expedition so that one of my roommates (I never mentioned this in the last post, but he didn't arrive until late Sunday night) could get some food. I spent the evening reading more of Odyssey Two before going to bed in preparation of another day.

Tuesday was pretty uneventful. More LabVIEW training (I did actually learn a thing or two), and setting up things on my computer. Wednesday was a bit more exciting. Once every quarter(?), NI buses all their employees down to a big auditorium for a Company Meeting. There just happened to be one on Wednesday, so LabVIEW training ended after lunch and we went down to the Company Meeting. Essentially, it was a bunch of keynote address-type things and speeches by assorted higher-ups in the company. Some of it was pretty interesting, some of it less so. Afterward, I went back and finished setting up my computer and whatnot, then clocked out for the day.

Garrett will be pleased to hear that I've started watching Doctor Who. I never had anything against it, I just never really had the time. Now that I've got scads of time, I'm working my way through the second season. I've seen bits and pieces of seasons 1-3, but I've missed quite a few episodes. I think there are actually a few episodes of season 1 that I've missed too. I should go back and check.

On Thursday, I LabVIEW training until lunch. I now know how to do a lot of things in LabVIEW that I didn't before, including event-based programming and multi-process/multi-thread control. I don't know that any of this will ever be useful, but now I know it. After lunch, I spent a few hours going through assorted slideshows on assorted policies and practices, then went to the deck party. The deck party was in honor of the previous day's company meeting. Lots of free fried things, beer, wine, soda, and music out on the patio between buildings B and C. It would have been a lot of fun if I had friends around here, but even so, free food is free food.

At this point, I guess I should touch on the friends bit. I'm not really trying to make friends here. I know that's cold and antisocial and unhealthy and whatnot. It's not that I'm actively avoiding people; I'm just not putting forth the energy to be social. Having friends is great and all, but I'm here for twelve weeks, and I'm here to do a job. It's a lot less stressful (for me) if I don't have to think about the social aspect. I'm sure most of the human race would disagree, but for the most part, life is easier on my own. There are times when I wish I had people to hang out with, but I that doesn't mean I'm about to get chummy with a bunch of people I don't know just because I happen to live or work with them. If I meet some interesting people, I won't avoid them (much), but in the mean time, I'm fine by myself, thank you very much.

Somewhere between Tuesday and Thursday, I finished Odyssey Two. It's a good book, and I'll leave it at that. I've heard the other two in the series are not as good as the first two, which is a shame. I'm deciding what else to read this summer. I may invest in a Kindle account and read on my laptop (that's how I read 2001 and 2010, although I read them in PDF form). I figure if I go with a Kindle account, I can either buy a Kindle some day or just use my phone/laptop/future tablet and the Kindle app.

In other news, I discovered on Thursday that my laptop really cannot handle Fallout 3. The lag is just terrible. This is sad, but not entirely unexpected. I'm going to build a new desktop at the end of the summer so I have something to game with. In keeping with my tradition of naming my computers after fictional intelligent machines and AIs, I'm thinking her name will be Athena. If anyone wants a new desktop, I'd love to make her a twin (Boomer).

On Friday I finally learned exactly what it is I'm doing this summer. Without going into too much detail, I'm essentially designing a breakout board for a PCIe controller chip that's being used as a load-tester for PCIe/PXIe. I'll be doing the schematics and layout for this load tester, which will spam packets across the bus to the controller to test how it can handle full loading, even at PCIe 3, which isn't out yet. I cut out early because I'd already worked 42 hours this week.

I'm once again tired of typing, so I'll stop here, but as promised, I got through the week. Don't expect a blow-by-blow of my life in future posts. I imagine that would get very boring very fast. I just figured I've had enough people ask about my week that there was some interest. I'm going to go eat now (yes, at quarter after nine).

Internship: Week One

It's Been a While Hasn't It?

I always said I'd update this when I felt like it, and I guess I just haven't really had a chance...in the last four months. I'm sure my dedicated readers are devastated. In any case, I'm not going to do a semester in review right now. I'm going to do a week in review.

For the uninitiated, I'm spending my summer in Austin, TX as an intern at National Instruments, purveyors of such fine products as LabVIEW and the cRIO (and many many other things). Long story short, they sell hardware and software that allows people to make electrical measurements and generate electrical signals to control things like robots and factories and supercolliders. I'm going to be spending my summer designing a circuit board to stress test PCIe (and PXIe) controllers by saturating them with traffic and seeing what they do.

I flew into Austin on Saturday, via Houston. That little adventure started with me finding out that my bag was too heavy to go on the plane. Some quick unpacking and it was able to go on the plane, but for a $100 surcharge. Now, I wouldn't have a problem with that, except that if the contents of that bag were in two bags, they would have been free. Clearly, the $100 isn't being used to cover fuel costs. Maybe there's some really strong guy who will only carry bags if you pay him lots of money. In any case, I got my bag checked. The flight itself was was pretty uneventful. There's something amazing about a world where flying across the country is positively unexciting. Also, airlines have gotten even stingier in the last five years: despite taking a three hour flight straddling lunch time, there was no food (there never is anymore), unless I wanted to pay six dollars for chips and salsa. Needless to say, I declined.

Arrived in Austin around 3:15 PM local time (Texas really is living in the past, but only by an hour). Retrieved my bag, which was the first off the plane. That's never happened to me before, so maybe that's what $100 buys you. I then grabbed a cab to the corporate housing they've put us up in. That too was an adventure. I had the cab drop me off where I thought I was going, but apparently there are two side-by-side complexes of apartments. After wandering through the first one and not finding my building, I realized that I must be in the second one. I walked here, got my key from the lockbox and came in to meet my roommates, or at least the two who were already there.

I'm not going to go into detail about my roommates aside from to say they're all nice guys and friendly--I just don't like having roommates. The setup here is a two bedroom apartment shared between four guys. Each bedroom is set up more or less like a hotel room with two twin beds, a TV, a dresser, and for some reason no desk. The closet is bigger than any I have seen before, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Same for the bathroom. Altogether, there are more closets than I would know what to do with, even if I had all of my worldly possessions with me. Given that I have but one (albeit heavy) suitcase, the closets have gone unappreciated. The real shame is that the bedroom itself could be a bit bigger. Maybe then there would be room for a desk or two.

The apartment is fully furnished, right down to the linens on the beds and the dishes in the kitchen. That's nice, but for what we're paying, the kitchen could have had a better assortment of cooking implements. After spending a year in a fully stocked kitchen, this is definitely a step down. </rant>

Fortunately, one of my roommates has a car, so we were able to drive over to a store and buy some groceries, which pretty much brings Saturday to a close. Sunday afternoon, we all walked down to the mall across the highway (about two miles). It's an outdoor mall (Clevelanders can compare to Legacy Village), but with a bunch of apartments and offices above the stores. Essentially, they plopped a town down on the side of the highway. The mall itself is a waste of space in my opinion--a bunch of overpriced stores that I would never shop in. There was a Borders, but it's closed. I did enjoy having an afternoon that I literally had nowhere I needed to be and nothing I needed to do. Between work and projects and homework, I haven't actually had nothing to do in longer than I care to remember. I felt like I should be going somewhere, and then I remembered I had nowhere to go. It was kind of nice. I ditched my roommates (again, nothing personal, I'm just a loner) and wandered around the mall. I spent an hour or two on the phone. I had lame, overpriced chicken parmigiana. When I got back, I started reading 2010: Odyssey Two. I'm going to need more books.

I'm now tired of typing, and all I wrote was a weekend in review. I guess I'll write more tomorrow. Or in four months.

Atheism, Agnosticism, and Science

I'm going to start off with a few definitions. These are my own definitions, and they may or may not be reflected anywhere else or by anyone else.

atheism: the absence of religion or the absence of belief in a deity or deities (literally a-theism: without religion). atheism is divided into two types of atheist: Agnostic atheists, and the other kind of atheist, who I am going to call an affirmative (non-Agnostic) atheist.

agnosticism: the refusal to commit to a belief in a deity or the abscence of a deity. In essence, the ultimate in open-mindedness.

affirmative atheism: atheists who are not agnostic are affirmative atheists. They believe that there is no deity or higher power. This is itself a religious belief, and like any religious belief, requires a certain amount of faith in the unknown.

Atheism (capital A): an organized sect (similar to a religion) that professes the nonexistence of deities. The difference between atheism and Atheism is organization. Atheists are organized and communal; atheists are not.

All of this can be rather confusing and is often confused, by religious people and atheists alike.

Overall, I think the distinction between agnosticism and atheism is less important than the distinction between atheism and Atheism. In certain elements of the news media and the political class, atheists are viewed as Atheists. Similar to the Cold War era fallacy that all communists were united (and joined with socialists) in a single massive organization, this is false. Most atheists are simply individuals who for whatever reason don't believe in a god or gods. They may have been raised without religion, or they may have come to their beliefs independently. A(a)theists are less likely to assemble than religious people, and they are less likely to form a community around their lack of belief because their lack of belief is not central to their identity or how they live their lives. Unlike a Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism, atheism requires nothing of people who practice it because one does not practice it. It simply is. (Of course, there are many Atheists, and they do support some kind of Atheist community and dogma.)

This brings me to science. Science and religion are often pitted as adversaries. People say that science wishes to destroy religion, or that science is intrinsically Atheist (with a capital A). First of all, science is not atheist, nor is it Atheist. It is necessarily agnostic in all matters including theology. Let me explain that. The nature of science is to be unsure--to challenge what others believe and what you believe. This idea that all beliefs must be based in evidence is the core of science and is also the motivation of agnosticism. Conversely, religion and affirmative atheism are both founded around the premise of faith in the unprovable or unknowable. This does not mean that all scientists are atheist or even agnostic in their personal lives. I happen to know several engineering and science students who are devout Christians. What it does mean is that an educated person, particularly a scientist, does not hold his or her religious beliefs above question, and is not averse to putting these beliefs in the context of what they and others observe of the world. It is hypocritical for one to accept some scientific knowledge (chemistry, electricity, cosmology, etc) but not others (evolution, geology, etc) without providing evidence against one claim (e.g. evolution) in favor of another (e.g. creation). To do so would be hypocritical and illogical.

This means that all educated people must answer hard questions about their beliefs. Some people are able to reconcile their knowledge of the world around them (science) with their beliefs about what they do not know (religion). As I mentioned earlier, I know many intelligent religious people who focus their religious beliefs on the things they do not know. They don't let their beliefs interfere with what science has answered. Others cannot reconcile their religion with science. Some become affirmative atheists. I must stress here that the premise that there is no god has no more evidence behind it than the premise that there is one, so affirmative atheism is itself a belief. Some become agnostic, refusing to commit to either premise. There is a fourth group, and they are a thorn in the side of those who view science as progress. These people do not question their beliefs. Rather than construct a system of beliefs that can live in harmony with the human body of knowledge, they deny that knowledge. These are the people who refute evolution. These are the young-Earth creationists. These are the people who challenge global warming with arguments from Genesis. They are suspicious of science, and they demonize it. To them, science is a conspiratorial effort to systematically dismantle religion. Were this true, they would have every right to vilify science and scientists. Fortunately for us all, it is not.

Science is not the adversary of religion but the adversary of the unknowable. Science attempts to explain and answer the questions that arise from everything around us. Science explained lightning and sunrises, which were once purely the domain of religion. Now, science is explaining where life came from, which is still in the domain of religion for many. Scientists (or at least most of them) do not set out to disprove religion. Religion sought answers to things that were unknowable. Some of these things have since become known, and what we come to know sometimes conflicts with religion. That means religion was wrong about some things, certainly not for the first time and probably not for the last. Of course, it is fallacious to suggest that disproving part of religion disproves it all. Science can never explain everything. The realm of the unknowable is shrinking, but slowly. There is still much for religion to explain, but in committing to religion, understand that you are putting your faith in something unknown. Be prepared for the day that we can know it, and be prepared for the possibility that you were wrong. Accept this graciously, and reexamine what you believe.

My Senior Project

I'm still getting into the swing of this blogging thing. I figure a blog with no readers is allowed to have a sporadic (read: sparse) update schedule.

Anyway, today's topic is my senior project. If you're an engineering student, you know we're all required to do one (or more) practical project before we graduate--the senior project. Although I'm still in my third year, I have senior standing and I've decided to do my first senior project (of two) this semester. I'm working with three other seniors here, and we're going to take a Parrot AR.Drone, slap a LIDAR on it, and create software to make it able to autonomously explore an indoor environment. We're hoping to get funding for the project from the Air Force Research Laboratory's Student Challenge, which funds senior projects addressing a series of problem statements.

Parrot created the AR.Drone as an Augmented Reality Game toy. It has two cameras onboard, and you fly it using an iP[od|ad|hone]. The iOS app includes games such as shooting other AR.Drones with virtual missiles and such. The cool thing about this is that the computing hardware Parrot uses for this is powerful and modifiable. There's a full embedded Linux machine inside of the AR.Drone, and they left it wide open (didn't even disable telnet). That means that we can start hacking together new code on the drone itself to process our new sensors and maybe tune the control algorithms. Because the Drone communicates over WiFi and Parrot has released an API to control the drone from custom software. Using this API and the Robot Operating System, we're going to write code for mapping (using data from the LIDAR and the AR.Drone's IMU) and autonomous path planning.

Our first challenge is going to be putting all of the hardware together. Parrot designed the AR.Drone very close to the edge of its performance limits. That means it can't take much payload. We want to put a 160g LIDAR on a 420g AR.Drone. Obviously, that's going to take a toll on the hardware. What remains to be seen is how much. People on the internet (always a reliable source) have claimed payloads between 100g and 250g. We're going to lighten what we can wherever we can, but no matter how you slice it, we're walking a fine line between success and destabilizing the drone. We're going to do some stress tests this weekend on a borrowed drone to see how much it can fly with before it loses control, cannot take off, or the motors start overheating.