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This web developer says that Google’s new Maps feature is better than Mapquest.
An article appeared in the LA Times today, by an Iranian blogger, writing under a pseudonym, and describing how she was arrested for the crime of criticizing the government in her weblog.
At first she was told she would be detained for only a few hours. But she was then thrown in a cell and ignored. Later she was told she might be imprisoned for years. As you might imagine, there was no trial of any kind.
Keep this in mind next time you hear liberals opposing our goal of bringing Democracy to the mid-east.
TEHRAN “Excuse me, Miss, but here in my hand I have a warrant for your arrest,” said a middle-aged man with a few days’ growth of beard. “Please do not make any noise as you walk calmly to the Mercedes parked at the corner.”
...When we arrived at our destination, I was left standing outside with the late December sun penetrating the blindfold they had insisted I wear. The cold and fresh air suggested northern Tehran, which meant Evin, the most notorious prison. I stood there for about half an hour, my calf muscles aching.
“Excuse me, how long do you think I will be kept here?” I asked the next person who spoke to me.
“It depends on you,” he replied. “If you cooperate, it will be brief.”
I was led down a spiral staircase. A woman with a velvet voice asked me to strip and handed me a prison uniform.
“But they told me it won’t be more than a few hours.”
...I was led to a cell, and a heavy, solid metal door was closed and locked. The cell was about 12 feet by 12 feet, with a small sink. The walls were blank, a recently painted cream color. Two gray blankets were folded on the floor. The ceiling was barred. Guards peeped in through a hole in the door every 20 minutes or so. I curled myself in a blanket. I had been expected home at noon. What do they want from me?
On my second day in confinement, I asked a guard, “Do you know why I am here?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Your interrogator will tell you.”
The next day, I was taken to a room down a long corridor and told to sit down. A fat hand with an agate stone ring set an interrogation form in front of me. Then he began asking about my Web log, which has hyperlinks on it to Western feminist groups.
“Do you accept the charges?” the interrogator asked.
“What charges?”
“That you have written things in your Web log that go against the Islamic system and that encourage people to topple the system,” he said. “You are inviting corrupt American liberalism to rule Iran.”
“I’ve tried to write my ideas and opinions in my Web log and to communicate with others in Farsi all over the world,” I said.
He was displeased.
“These answers will lead us nowhere, and you will stay here for years. Tell us the truth. How much have you received to write these offenses against the Islamic state? How are you and your fellow Web loggers organized?”
How should I respond? I knew my mother must be terribly worried about me. What could I say to make sure I got out?
The Islamo-fascists want all of us to live like that.
The Saudis are running mosques on U.S. soil teaching people to hate. That needs to stop. See this post for info on how you can help.
In early November, I posted:
Conservatives are supposed to be the stick-in-the-muds, the ones who just want to keep everything the way it is; Liberals are supposed to be the ones who want to change with the times.
Id just like to point out, that somewhere along the way, our two leading political parties have traded places in this regard.
They call themselves the party for change, but the only change Liberals seek is to vote themselves into office. Other than that, they offer few strategies for improving the country. Theyre the party of wanting to stop everything. Theyre the anti partyagainst the war on terrorists; against missile defense; against the making of profits by business. What are they for?
Today Joe Klein makes a similar point in Time Magazine:
The day after the President’s speech, the party’s congressional leaders gathered at the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial to carp. How 70 years ago! “Progressive” Dems – and I use the term advisedly, since liberals seem more interested in preserving the past than in discovering the future – are right to admire Roosevelt. But the Roosevelt they worship is a bronze sculpture, frozen in time. The real F.D.R. was a gutsy innovator. The current Democrats resemble nothing so much as the Republicans during the 25 years after Roosevelt’s deathnegative, defensive, intellectually feeble, a permanent minority. There are reasons to oppose this President – arrogance abroad, crony capitalism at home – but undifferentiated opposition is obtuse and most likely counterproductive.
(via WizBang. )
Dick Morris does the political calculus that anticipates that Condi’s ethnic status could be a big plus were she to run for President:
To stop Hillary, draft Condi
As she tours the continent after her Senate confirmation, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is like a rock star — her every movement, her every meeting covered by an adoring media.
America’s first black female secretary of state is doing in public what she has always done in private — speaking frankly about America’s priorities and the realities of the post-Cold War world. As she jokes with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, loosening up his dogmatic anti-American policies, lectures Russia about freedom and warns Israel of tough decisions ahead, one thing is obvious: A star is being born.
Traveling without the entourage customary for secretaries of state, on time, mapping out in advance her first six months of travel, Rice is a new force in American politics.
As the Republican Party casts about for a viable presidential candidate in 2008 to keep Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) out of the White House, attention will inevitably focus on Rice, the woman who may stand between Clinton and the presidency.
Since Bush’s success in Iraq has laid the basis for negotiation in the Middle East, there is every prospect that Rice may preside over a diplomatic triumph in catalyzing the discussions between Sharon and Abbas. The firm American stand in Iraq will also make more likely success in Korea and Iran, all of which would add to the prestige of Rice.
The political fact is that a Rice candidacy would destroy the electoral chances of the Democratic Party by undermining its demographic base. John Kerry got 54 percent of his vote from three groups that, together, account for about a third of the American electorate: African-Americans, Hispanics and single white women. Rice would cut deeply into any Democrat’s margin among these three groups and would, most especially, deny Clinton the strong support she would otherwise receive from each of them.
...America longs to put the period on the disgraceful chapter in our nation’s history that began when the first slave arrived at Jamestown, Va., more than 400 years ago. We also want to send a message to every girl, and every African-American or Hispanic baby, that there is no ceiling and that you can rise as far as your ability will carry you. The day Condi Rice is sworn in as president, regardless of the fate of her administration, that message and the punctuation of our history of racism will be obvious.
Hillary vs. Condi? That’d be the political equivalent of a rock concert.
There may not be a lot of flying cars yet, but it’s definitely the future.
There’s this wild thing going on in the design world. Computers generate a bunch of designs. The least successful at achieving the specific design goal—for example, a radio antenna—are discarded; the most successful are combined with each other and produce new designs. It’s natural selection applied to product design. It’s all done inside of a computer, so thousands of generations of designs can be generated quickly.
This bizarre approach is actually generating usable products. And the wild thing is—sometimes people have no idea why the products work. From Technology Review:
Evolutionary algorithms, also known as genetic algorithms or GAs, take their cue from biological evolution, which can turn a crawling reptile into a soaring bird without any kind of forward-looking blueprint. In sexual reproduction, the shuffling of each parents genescombined with random genetic mutationcreates organisms with new characteristics, and the less fit organisms tend not to pass on their genes to succeeding generations. Evolutionary algorithms work much the same way, but inside a computer. When Lohn creates a new antenna, for example, he starts off with a population of randomly generated designs and grades their relative performance. Designs that come close to preset goals win the right to intermingle their properties with those of other successful candidates. Designs that disappoint go the way of the archaeopteryx: oblivion.
This gizmo is an antenna:
Breeding antennas takes time, of course. Most designs are downright awful, and it takes a large number of computing cycles to find decent performers. Still, when youve got a computer that can generate and test 1,000 generations an hour, interesting ideas do emerge*. Lohn, a PhD who hasnt taken a course on electromagnetism since his undergraduate years, expects to have at least one of his teams antenna designs go into space this year as part of NASAs Space Technology 5 mission, which will test a trio of miniature satellites. His favorite computer-designed antenna: a corkscrew contraption small enough to fit in a wine glass, yet able to send a wide-beam radio wave from space to Earth. It resembles nothing any sane radio engineer would build on her own.
Evolutionary algorithms are a great tool for exploring the dark corners of design space, Lohn says. You show [your designs] to people with 25 years experience in the industry and they say, Wow, does that really work? The slightly spooky answer is that yes, they really do, as Lohn established after months of testing.
Pretty freaky, huh?
...says NASAs Lohn, There are two schools of thought. One says I just need something that does X, Y, and Z, and if evolution gives me X, Y, and Z, thats all I care about. The other school wants to know whats in there and how it works. We cant really help those people, because we frequently see evolved designs that are completely unintelligible.
That’s hype, of course. If we really wanted to figure out how one of these designs worked, we’d figure it out. Studying such a design that at first seemed unintelligible would surely be a great way to learn new things.
The faster computers get, the more of this stuff we’re going to see.
(Via GeekPress. )
