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Tue, 22 Oct 2002
Looks like they're shipping. (I'm sourcing a review machine -- should be worth a write-up in Shopper, and anyway these wonderful gadgets are wasted on their target market, primary school children.)
posted at: 22:13 | path: /toys | permanent link to this entry(This is probably funnier if you read A Colder War first ...)
Apparently the following turned up on the Culture Mailing List (for devotees of Iain M. Banks):
Brad DeLong said:
> Clearly what we need now are Wombats of Mass Destruction.
Lester Hecht is writing a report that scares him. It's a hot summer night in Langley and yet he feels cold. He finishes typing a sentence then reaches across his desk and slides another plain brown envelope into the lamp's small circle of light. As he moves to open it, he notices his hand is shaking. He puts the envelope down, leans back in his chair and closes his eyes for a few moments. It's late and he's been working on this hellish material for many hours and his eyes hurt and he wishes he'd never learned these things, that he could just forget it all. He reaches for his cigarettes, lights one, and breathes deeply. A minute passes, then another. Finally he feels his resolve return and opens the envelope.
Lester slides a photocopy of a newpaper article from a now defunct Iraqi propaganda paper out of the envelope. It shows the dictator standing with a small group of children, smiling. He's not quite pulling off "benevolent" but seems to have effortlessly hit "sinister". In the background are lines of cages. There is a large sign in arabic, and below that a smaller sign in English that says "Karbala Petting Zoo".
He puts the sheet aside, and removes the next item. It is an image from a Cheyenne photoreconaissance satellite passing high over Diwaniyah. The analysts from the National Reconaissance Office have already been over the image, covering it with little boxes and helpful labels. It shows a number of low buildings somewhere deep in the Iraqi desert. A bulldozer is visible next to the rough track along which vehicles from Karbala have been arriving under cover of darkness. There are guard posts, some APCs, barracks. He squints at a fuzzy, organic shape labelled "anomaly" for a little while and then puts the image aside.
Next up is a photgraph of Saddam's birthday parade. It is taken from some high vantage point, but not from the air. Perhaps the photographer was in one of the hotels overlooking the parade route. A column of tanks and rocket launchers is passing one of the dictator's doubles, who is looking suitably grim and determined in the face of the Zionist-Imperialist Menace. The vehicle immediately in front of him is different to the others. It is the launch platform for a SCUD-2 missile, but it carries no rocket. Instead the heavy truck is modified to carry a cubic box covered with a tarpaulin. The wind is blowing the tarp against the cage and beneath it is the barest impression of bars. Lester knows that beneath the cover is a cage. Now, from the other intelligence reports, he knows what lies within that cage. Finally, chillingly, he has learned that it isn't a bluff.
Once more, he leans back in his chair and wonders how to tell the President that Iraq now has Wombats.[ Link ] [ Discuss (thanks to Richard Baker) ]
posted at: 22:09 | path: /fun | permanent link to this entryBig Brother called while you were out ...
I'm just back from Dublin. It's been a relaxing weekend, indulging in my favourite private vices -- buying books, drinking with friends, and being rained on. (Well, maybe not that last item.) Octocon was about as small and friendly as I'd expected, and I've remembered why I used to do lots of small friendly SF cons. Maybe next year ...
Then I got home to find that yes, Toto, this is the twenty-first century -- and I'm not entirely happy with it.
The Observer have broken a fun little story about celldar being developed in the UK. This isn't entirely news; New Scientist ran a story about celldar a couple of years ago, pointing out that it can in principle defeat the stealth technology used by modern combat aircraft and missiles. Stealth relies on the craft being shaped to reflect radar pulses away from the transmitter/receiver, making it appear much dimmer. Celldar doesn't use a single radar transmitter; it uses the cellphone network, and smart receivers that can synthesize a whole bunch of noisy return signals from all directions to see what's going on. Because stealth designs are optimized to work against one problem -- a radar transmitter located ahead of the aircraft -- they work badly against distributed mesh systems like celldar.
What I didn't spot is that celldar is being developed -- in conjunction with terahertz radar -- for distributed local-scale radar surveillance. Who needs video cameras everywhere when there's an invisible sea of tagged radio waves that you can track moving objects through (by working out what's blocking signals from different transmitters)? It should have been obvious from the zeitgeist; software defined radio is upsetting a lot of apple carts right now. But somehow I didn't twig to the possibility that within a couple of years there are going to be Big Brother devices out there that let any cop or spook with access to the cellphone exchanges literally see right through walls and track moving objects -- people, cars, whatever. At least you can see a TV camera and tag it with spray paint. What the hell does celldar do to our concept of privacy?
[ Link ] [ Discuss Big Brother ]
posted at: 20:10 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entryspecials:
Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone
Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction
Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab
"Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex
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[ Gwyneth Jones ]
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[ Halfway down the Danube ]
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[ Shrillblog ]
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[ Martin Wisse ]
[ Kuro5hin ]
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[ The Register ]
[ Cryptome ]
[ Juan Cole: Informed comment ]
[ Global Guerillas (John Robb) ]
[ Shadow of the Hegemon (Demosthenes) ]
[ Simon Bisson's Journal ]
[ Max Sawicky's weblog ]
[ Guy Kewney's mobile campaign ]
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[ MetaFilter ]
[ NTKnow ]
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[ Fafblog ]
[ BBC News (Scotland) ]
[ Pravda ]
[ Meerkat open wire service ]
[ Warren Ellis ]
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[ Hullabaloo (Digby) ]
[ Jeff Vail ]
[ The Whiskey Bar (Billmon) ]
[ Groupthink Central (Yuval Rubinstein) ]
[ Unmedia (Aziz Poonawalla) ]
[ Rebecca's Pocket (Rebecca Blood) ]
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(I screwed the pooch in respect of the blosxom entry datestamps on March 28th, 2002, so everything before then shows up as being from the same time)
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