Operation Oddysey Dawn, on the road to the Q-word.

Rebels flee their positions after shelling from Gaddafi's forces near Ajdabiyah, March 25, 2011.
REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic

Well this certainly isn't helpful for Operation Oddysey Dawn.   I mean, dangit.  Who could have seen this coming?   Libya crisis: Gaddafi forces adopt rebel tactics   

"...The first is that Colonel Gaddafi's army has decided to follow methods which the rebels have used so successfully.  Its men are racing forward in the ordinary flat-bed trucks known elsewhere in Africa as 'technicals', with heavy machine-guns or anti-aircraft guns mounted on the back.  Others are equipped with mortars. Though these are quite light, they often cause great panic among the rebels, and are quick and easy to move forward...

.. it was fairly easy to destroy tanks and artillery from the air, even though, as we now know, the coalition's aircraft and missiles had difficulty dealing with tanks that had been well camouflaged or were stationed in narrow streets between houses, where ordinary civilians live.
Now the pro-Gaddafi forces have largely switched to the use of "technicals" of the kind the rebels use, the coalition will have much more difficulty identifying which ones belong on which side."

The original plan was to protect civilians caught up in the civil war/rebellion/insurgency by destroying the Libyan military assets, machine and otherwise with pinpoint airstrikes. Boom, done.  That worked as planned, so now the Libyan military is tooling around in attack trucks just like the rebels'.  So the coalition will have to change tactics or risk watching the whole thing turn into Operation Oddysey Dusk.

Next predictable development..  CIA advisers on the ground to gather intelligence and make contacts with the rebels/terrorists/freedom fighters and to direct airstrikes on their behalf.  C.I.A. in Libya Aiding Rebels, U.S. Officials Say 

"..While President Obama has insisted that no American ground troops join in the Libyan campaign, small groups of C.I.A. operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks and are part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration hopes can help set back Colonel Qaddafi’s military, the officials said.

The C.I.A. presence comprises an unknown number of American officers who had worked at the spy agency’s station in Tripoli and those who arrived more recently. In addition, current and former British officials said, dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers are working inside Libya. The British operatives have been directing airstrikes from British Tornado jets and gathering intelligence about the whereabouts of Libyan government tank columns, artillery pieces, and missile installations, the officials said."

To succeed this operation will take more than precision airstrikes. Clue; boots.  Is President Obama ready to go to Congress and the people and make a case to escalate this war/peacekeeping/ effort to bring about a regime change in Libya? I hope not.  I think he's smarter than that, but who can say.

Japanese robots can dance and ride bikes, but can they fix a nuclear reactor?

I saw a story today about how some special robots are being shipped from the USA to Japan to help regain control in the Fukushima nuclear reactors.  These handy robots can travel into the high level radiation environment to provide video feed, take measurements and even help clean up radioactive waste. Japan nuclear plant gets help from US robots

OK, a blog called "Pathteacher" has to comment on this story.  Whodathunk the USA would ever, ever export a robot to Japan?  Not me.  For cripes sake, in Japan there is a factory where robots build more robots.  There isn't a more robocentric culture or automation focused industry anywhere.  The fact that no Japanese company thought to engineer a robot specifically for performing dangerous work in hostile environments comes as a surprise to me.   Having to enlist the assistance of American-born robots must be difficult for many in Japan to accept and I'm not being flippant there. Its a matter of pride.

I will take the opportunity to point out some very cool Japanese robots that can do things other than clean up nuclear waste..

First, my favorite robot, the Sony QRIO robot. These can dance..

Then there is Murata Boy.  This handy robot can ride a bicycle.

Then finally, there is the Honda Asimo robot.  From the looks of it, this robot can climb up stairs without needing a handrail... or maybe not.    

I'm sure that now inspired to do so and with a design to mimic, some Japanese company will develop an even better robot for hazardous duty than the ones the US will send to assist in Fukushima.  It doesn't need to be able to dance or ride a bike or look like a stormtrooper for that matter, but it does need to be able to go up and down stairs.  To get to the emergency power generator in the basement.

Rebellions, asymetrical warfare, and youtube..

I'm not down with the whole Libya thing, not quite yet anyway.  And no its not because I'm some Obama hating wingnut.  I actually think Obama has done pretty well playing the part of George W. Bush's 3rd term.  I just don't get this military approach to protect civilians.  How can you protect civilians when you can't tell combatants from civilians?  I guess its to kill off the people who wear uniforms which will then empower the ones who don't wear them and good luck figuring out that mess after the shooting stops.

True there have been attacks from Libyan military on areas where civilians were known to be.  Maybe even a case for war crimes.  But Quadaffi is fighting a rebellion in a sovereign nation in which the last time I checked, like it or not he was still the HMFWBIC, as in the head mother f-er who be in charge.  And the combatants he is fighting are hiding (or not hiding) in civilian areas. Does that give them free reign with no fear of attack?  For some perspective look at how Syria handled the Hama uprising in 1982.

The Syrian military shelled, exploded, gassed, and shot an entire village of some 10,000-ish people in which rebels were operating from in cooperation with the locals. No one around the world even blinked an eye back then. Or look at how the US military in Iraq had to operate in civilian areas to engage hostile militias. Or how Israel had to fight their last war in Lebanon when Hezbollah combatants fired rockets from civilian neighborhoods and near UNIFIL locations.

We have two trends working together in a dog-chases-tail scenario.. The Internet allows instant sharing of accounts and video of atrocities, so leaders can no longer quell a rebellion without the world finding out immediately. And the preferred tactic of rebels, insurgents, terrorists, whatever you call them has become to use civilians as shields and wage tactical attacks against the enemy from populated areas. Combined, these two forces will lead to more rebellions and chaos. Fine, you say for people over there.

But what about if some radical armed militia here in the US decides to wage attacks against the government or military from civilian locations? You think we might see some collateral damage in the response? oh perhaps. No I am not trying to compare our two nations' military forces in any way. Of course the US would take every effort to avoid any civilian casualties, but it happens.
  
Hopefully someday in the future, assuming we can stop the violence by killing enough of the military and security  forces, we can hand off the protection of the new Libya to a new batch of soldiers who will get to wear uniforms and be targets for the next rebellious "civilians". Good luck with that.

Why do we want to get in the middle of that hot mess?

Happy Birthday Harry Houdini

Harry Houdini (born Erik Weisz; March 24, 1874 – October 31, 1926) was a Hungarian-born American magician and escapologist, stunt performer, actor and film producer noted for his sensational escape acts. He was also a skeptic who set out to expose frauds purporting to be supernatural phenomena.

A truly amazing performer and person. He demonstrated an incredible escapability from all sorts of predicaments including handcuffs, shackles and chains, straight-jackets, tanks of water, hanging upside down, suspended in midair, etc, to stupefied fans around the world. His skills were so "off the hook" some even thought he was invoking some sort of supernatural powers. But Harry would have none of that talk about supernatural powers. He was absolutely pro-science, and enjoyed publicly debunking self-proclaimed psychics and mediums as frauds.

 He died in Grace Hospital in Detroit on October 31, (aka Halloween) 1926, from the effects of a ruptured appendix. 

And here is a haunting Kate Bush song along with some great photos of the master for the occasion..
Rosabelle, believe..

 

Think about the problem before you dive in..

Everyone has experienced or heard a story of the teacher who distributed a 25-question examination with clear instructions to the class to read all of the questions before answering any.  And to make the long story short, question #25 ends up being something like.  "Ignore the first 24 questions and turn in a blank page with only your name on it"..  ha.  Sure enough, at least some of the kids get busy immediately answering questions instead of reading them all first and then look like dummies later..  Good lesson to learn early in life.  Otherwise you might find yourself in a room full of partially assembled IKEA furniture looking at the directions for Step 12 realizing now that you did step 5 wrong.
 
But my favorite sort of classroom trickery was the math challenges..  The questions you had to think about for a while before diving in.  Hmm.  What's the trick?  Where's the gimmick?  I always wanted to be the first kid with the answer but it was tough competition. 

A good example..  A teacher wants to give a child a tedious math assignment to keep him busy for an hour.  She tells him to add up all the numbers from 1 to 100.  as in 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +.. all the way to 100.  Have fun kid!  ha.

So the kid comes up to her desk a minute later and says, "Yo teach I get 5,050 is that right?"  To her amazement, he was correct.  So, explain how it is possible for someone to add up 100 numbers so quickly.

 Easy one right.  See the pattern?  0+100 = 100,  1+99=100,  2+98=100, ... 49+51=100.  So that's 50 ways to make 100 and 50 in the middle left over.  5,050.  easy as Pi.

The lesson..  Think about your problem before you dive into the solution.  understand it, draw it, look for patterns, make it simpler.  Laziness is a virtue in math.  And remember my theory for everything..  The more difficult a problem seems, the simpler its solution will be.            

Economic stability and geologic transients..

Some 7 billion people or so populate nearly every corner of the planet in a scheme where (most) people spend their time and effort working in some way in return for money to exchange for things they need and want to buy. Using this basic framework for a somewhat cooperative society, its remarkable what humankind has accomplished over the last few thousand years. Our economic and social patchwork of a system has evolved into an amazing machine that allocates human resources around the globe to research, invent, manufacture, build, distribute, educate, feed, supply water, clothe, house, transport, cure, entertain, administrate, protect, destroy, and fill all the purposes that contribute to our standard of living. Almost no one is self-sufficient, but we all contribute in some way. By freeing up people from daily survival tasks it enables specialization of skills and efficiencies and provides a stream of innovation that make the technological advances more available to all. Man-made technology, not evolution, has enabled our species to propagate exponentially in this period. It isn't a perfect system, more like a Rube Goldberg machine, but it works more or less.

Until a major cataclysmic event. The kind with devastation so enormous society can't really prepare for it. Think major earthquakes, volcanoes, meteors.. With our complicated high tech modern global economic system, the shock waves to the economy will wreak havoc long after the seismic waves dampen out. The global economy barely feeds us all as it is. If there were to be a major disruption in a supply chain and valuable resources became scarce and expensive, it would increase costs and leave people at the fringes vulnerable to losing what meager lifeline they had. What happens when the supply ships with humanitarian aid quit arriving every week?

We have had some very damaging regional disasters in the past century in which many thousands of people have died and entire cities were wiped from the map, but none of these spread an economic contagion that dragged the global economy down with it. We've been lucky in some ways. The comet/meteor? that exploded over Russia in 1908 leveled some 800 square miles, but luckily it was a very remote area.  The Tunguska Event.  This explosion was compared to 1,000 times the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. If something of this size were to strike a major metropolitan area now, the toll could easily climb into the millions and send the entire global economy off the rails in its wake. No spot on the globe is immune from the destruction of a major geologic event. None of the 7 billion people are truly "safe".

What is unfolding in Japan in the wake of the recent earthquake and tsunami would have been strictly a local issue 100 years ago, but not anymore. The disruption to supply chains in various industries and the full impact of the disaster in Japan will take weeks to comprehend. It is difficult to gage how much of an economic contagion the global economy will be exposed to or how long it will be until all operations are back online. Of course there will be some price drops in commodities that Japan won't need as much of for a while like petroleum, and that will help consumers elsewhere somewhat.  There will be economic disruptions far beyond Japan due to the impact on currency exchanges, the reduced economic activity and damage to operations supplying high-tech components to other businesses worldwide.  Just be glad it wasn't anything close to another Tunguska Event over Shanghai or NYC. Humans would survive, but I'm not so sure our big machine would.

How do you measure how "angry" a city is?

This is pretty lame..  Magazine names Detroit angriest city in America  Detroit, the angriest city in America? really?  I don't know..  People you meet around here seem pretty friendly.  So I dig into the story to see what criteria was used to make the claim. I mean, how does one go about determining which city is the hotbed of anger.  So here it is..

To come up with the rankings, analysts compared aggravated assaults per capita, time spent in traffic during rush hour, the number of people with high blood pressure and the number of anger management specialists per capita for each of the cities.

Interesting set of criteria.  I guess you have to start somewhere.

1) Aggravated assault per capita:   If you had to pick one crime to represent anger, I guess this is the one.  But only a very small percentage of angry people actually go out and commit aggravated assault. Because this applies to such a small part of the whole group, I don't think it correlates to anger level in the general population.
 
2) Time spent in traffic during rush hour: This is a function of average commute distance, the amount of people employed, and the amount of road construction underway.  My problem with this is that as unemployment rises, rush hour traffic would become less of a problem.  I think that if unemployment was very high, there would be a lot of anger in the population.

3) Number of people with high blood pressure: There are a number of causes for high blood pressure, diet and weight contribute as well as stress level and genetics.  Its a medical condition, not a mood.   This assumes correlation that may not be there at all.  
  
4) Number of anger management specialists per capita: I suppose this could be a real indicator.  But it might just be tied to sentencing rules in the local courts. If anger management counselling became mandated as part of sentencing for certain crimes, new anger management specialists would open up shop to grab a slice of the buisness.  I don't think too many angry people actually show up for anger management therapy without getting prodded by the courts.

And I notice that Madison Wisconsin was #5 on the list of least angry cities in America.  Ha.  Not if you've been watching the news lately.  More like angriest place this side of the Middle East.

OK, if I was going to try to scale angriness of cities and had to pick four predictors, I would look at these factors.

1) Percentage of workforce who belong to a union.  Unions thrive by keeping members angry. 
2) Long-term unemployment rate. Long term joblessness breeds resentment.
3) Popularity of Fox News. They stoke anger and toss out red meat to attract angry viewers.
4) Turnover in elections.  Incumbents are safe until voters get angry. 

Might still be Detroit?  hmm.  Or Madison Wisconsin.