House of the rising Moonglum

I just looked at this humanity family tree and suddenly felt very small. All of recorded history is about two pixels wide on that chart. And what’s up with homo erectus? We can only dream about being around for that long.

I have been reading a lot more lately thanks mostly to an hour commute each way each day. The first book I finally got around to reading on the train was Beyond Fear, by Bruce Schneier. First a bit of background. I religiously read Schneier’s newsletter. (Pre-blog, though I believe that he has converted it into blog form.) It is a really entertaining and education monthly email. While I touch on computer security issues regularly, I am by no means a security expert, so seeing how an expert thinks can really help. Because I found the blog so useful, and because he has converted me over to many of his ways of thinking about things, I had high hopes for the book. It is billed as security for the common man, post 9/11. The idea being that you don’t have to be an expert to think about security, and in fact, you shouldn’t just take things at face value.

Unfortunately I found the book to be much more of a disjointed collection of his posts than a good, hand holding explanation of the real security tradeoffs that are currently going on around us. In fact, it I weren’t already a true believer, I might come away from this not “Beyond Fear” but “Quaking in Fear”. Don’t get me wrong, the book is well written, and clearly explains the different points about security that he is trying to make, it simply fails to pull it together into a coherent story. Which is too bad, because all the pieces are there that you need. And since I am a regular follower of his, I was easily able to piece together the “Beyond Fear” story. I just wonder if my mother would be able to.

But if you are already into the security scene, or if you just think that a lot of what passes for security in this country doesn’t make sense, this book is the book for you. On the other hand, if you don’t really have much of an opinion on security this is an interesting breakdown of the basic precepts of security and how it works and fails. Just remember: the job of a good security analyst is to find the weaknesses. He believes in security or he wouldn’t be doing in this field. Good security is achievable and does work, it is just harder to make happen than you probably think.

Just saw this movie with Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman on video. Apparently it’s based on a comic book, though I have never seen it. It starts out pretty amazing as a cross between the Matrix, the Fast and the Furious and the Office. Yes, the Office. It is so insane and almost entirely filmed around my current client’s office. Tons of awesome Chicago case scenes. Unfortunately it quickly devolves into Fight Club, with excessive violence and your standard male pop-psych. (Dude has to lose himself to find himself et al.) I’m always interested to find out what makes violence a rollicking good time or queazy cringe worthy material. This one definitely fell into the latter category.

The thing that disturbs me the most though, is that throughout the entire movie I was able to predict every next thing that was going to happen. With the exception of the final plot twist. (Which, now that I think about it, comes from Star Wars) In fact the entire second to final fight scene is straight out of Star Wars III.

Still… people using cars to fly and shoot bullets around corners. How cool is that?

Why am I unsurprised. The older I get the more I believe that Smedley Butler was on to something. War is a racket and the powerful have a lot to gain from it while the young and of little influence die. In any case, it looks like up to $150 billion was misused in Iraq by the US people in charge of making sure that reconstruction was done. We sure could use some of that money about now for our relief packages. Not to mention having some of those projects completed may have helped keep more Iraqi’s happy…

On another note, talk about misplaced ads. In a british newspaper, on an article about how much military spending is wasted, google decided to stick an ad for Lockheed: “Save the F-22! Protect American jobs!”. That cause no small amount of cognitive dissonance.

Translations of east-bloc lolcats.

Srsly you need to check it out.

The Trib claims that there is some problem with the funding of the Morse theater. If true that would make me really sad. That really brightens up the street and makes the whole place feel more livable. Not that I spend a lot of time on Morse, but seeing that bright theater sign lets me know I am almost home.

An article from the ASPO looks at peak oil from an financial standpoint. (From the living room in rogers park). The interesting thing about this article is that is points out how the US will most likely reach peak oil well before the rest of the world for the simple reason that we use so much more than the rest of the world now and finance our imports with borrowed money. One thing he doesn’t look at is how much the lenders rely on our solvency and continued production (aka energy usage.) Also now that oil prices have dropped due to the falling economy I wonder if some of the aggressive extraction projects in unstable regions will vanish. That would reduce the strength of his argument as well.

Edit to add: Heh, it looks like Kheris already thought of lenders relying on our stability as well.

OK, I’m wrong. This has been the coldest winter since I lived here. I was hanging out with a High School friend recently and she wanted to know my thoughts on this winter. Well at that point it was the coldest winter since 96 so I could just say “I’ve felt colder.” That is no longer true. This has been a heroically cold winter. This is also I suppose why she is fleeing back to California.

Also, I love Tom Skilling’s blog. It is totally info-porn with awesome graphics and everything.

There is big election going on. It’s been three years since the last one, and the Iraqis are having their second round of elections. And they seem to be going much more smoothly than the first. I think and hope that Obama will luck out with Iraq and that the local situation there will continue to improve making his great plan to bring troops out of Iraq make more sense. In any case a nice smooth set of provincial elections really helps out on the peace and prosperity front. I am happy for the Iraqi people and hope that this election helps bring them both.

It is kind of strange to think that one of the things that started me writing this blog was the war in Iraq. And here we are 6 years later, still there. Through a full election cycle. At least it seems that the level of violence is really finally dying down.