by ·Comments Off on Pick thy enemies carefully

The good thing about picking such an intangible invisible enemy as “terrorism”, is that you never have to spend too much time justifying your wars and your actions. “Terrorists”, much like “communists” a few decades ago, can surface anywhere and take on any appearance.
Although they preferably do not dress like us and probably do not celebrate Christmas or Thanksgiving. Ideally, their skin even has a different shade.

Declaring war on an invisible army force with, by definition, no way to assess your progress, is very convenient for two reasons:

First, because there’s nothing like a good war to help people forget about other less palatable aspects of your policies. Bush’s government is only the last of a long line of variously skilled politicians who have waged some improbable war and based their entire political agenda on this premise.

If we look on the American side, we got everything from the 50’s war on commies up until the would-be-laughable (if not for the countless lives it has destroyed, both in the US and abroad): “war on drugs“…

While there’s no need to go over the futility and hopelessness of the latter war, one thing bears reminding about the cold-war and one of its long-term consequences: following 1979’s invasion of Afghanistan by soviet forces, the US directly provided both military and financial support to resistance troops. The very same people that would, a decade later, take over the country and instigate one of the most oppressing Islamic dictatorship of all times, while apparently backing Al Qaeda operations… But more on that later.

Has anybody noticed to what extent domestic policies have been reduced to an overt game of back-patting self-gratification between white-house cronies, while at the same time receiving close to no media coverage?

I guess it’s much more exciting to report about the glorious advance of the War on Terrorism, rather than, say, focus on Bush’s catastrophic environmental policies or his frighteningly medieval AIDS prevention program based on… “abstinence”…

All in all, Bush’s buddies hardly bother hiding their cynical agenda: they know no one’s watching and hardly anyone cares, ’cause that whole war stuff is so much more exciting.

The other reason why you would want to start a war with enemies you can’t count is precisely that you can’t win it… There’s an infinite supply of evildoers to ensure your “war” never comes to an untimely end, suddenly bringing back the public’s short spanned-attention onto your lucrative little business of cronyism and embezzlement…

Of course, in order to avoid unpopular messy wars, this strategy requires quickly jumping from one opponent to the next, forcefully fitting entirely unrelated countries under a common description of “axis of evil”…

And to a point, it works: nobody (read: no mainstream media) seems to have noticed how quickly Afghanistan disappeared from the US focus and how, beside a few gas pipelines quickly restored and put back to work, nothing much has changed in war-torn Afghanistan ever since… Why did everyone forget so quickly about the original goals of the campaign in Afghanistan that seemed so clear at the time (“eradicate Al Qaeda”, “find Osama Ben Laden”, “rebuild the country”)? Simply because, just when it started being a bit more complicated than dropping bombs and shooting a few underarmed disheveled fanatics, when it started being about building stuff and organizing and investing important amount of money in a country with little promise for immediate return (remember: no oil there), then the US government understood it was time to get the hell away, let the UN deal with the mess and move onto the next target… Which happened to be the good old arch nemesis of yore: the evil Sadam Hussein!

And that’s where the invisible-enemy strategy choked on a serious bone and showed its flaws: when you can’t see your enemies, it’s much harder to beat them, especially if they start actually materializing into real, concrete, people with good reasons to kick your ass and wide support from their country.

Most people (including me, I must admit) were somewhat expecting this to happen in Afghanistan, as there’s a very famous historical precedent. But the US military were quite careful not to make the exact same mistake that cost the USSR its worst military defeat ever. There was close to no ground engagement in Afghanistan, and the US backed pretty much anybody willing to say they disliked Al Qaeda, giving them weapons and telling them to go take care of the bad guys for them, thus making room for the next generation of US-equipped violent factions that will backfire in a few years. But at the time, it worked out well, as the dreaded guerilla war that proved fatal to Soviet troops twenty years ago was avoided.

But there wasn’t such an option in Iraq: against a real country with a somewhat real army, the US had no other choice than to engage completely and send ground troops. Plus, this time, they had a much more specific agenda regarding the use of local resources (let’s liberate the oil derricks) that required real involvement, not just a few bombs casually dropped here and there. The problem came when, after getting rid of a bunch of thinly-motivated Iraqi regular troops, they had to deal with other people who had their own agenda (anti-US, pro-islamic etc) and much more determination to carry it through.

This is how the loop has been looped and now the US faces the same exact problem which the Soviet faced two decades ago: myriads of invisible partisans that do not care for their life and can easily get their hand on semi-heavy weapons (the ones the US provided them with, back when we still liked them better than their evil Iranian neighbours) that are all too sufficient to inflict continuous, relentless damages to occupation forces. If you’ve read any account of the Soviet-Afghan war, you will have noticed how strikingly similar the attacks are: a few people with a rocket-launcher can down a lot of planes or helicopters without much effort. The Afghans have done it successfully for years, and so are the Iraqis now.

On one side, a bunch of regular militaries in a foreign country, on the other side, guerilla fanatics with an increasingly wide popular support (due mostly to US ruthless behaviour toward civilians during the invasion)… Odds -and time- are working strongly against the US. And it’s not hard to see the specter of an Afghan-style defeat looming over the horizon (Vietnam being not too far either, although the involvement levels are definitely not comparable).

Just as a note: although there hardly ever was a single real “battle” fought on Afghan territory during the Afghan-Soviet war, the Soviet lost a total of more than 25,000 troops over their decade of occupation, before completely withdrawing in 1989…

Continued in some next entry

in the meantime, you can always read this rather funny piece about why “White House No Longer Uses Orwell and Machiavelli as ‘Consultants'”

by ·Comments Off on Behold! the wonders of Mobloging

After much, much, much fiddling and tweaking with bits of perl, PHP and MT configuration, I am now finally able to post text and pictures from my new keitai…

The phone itself is pretty sweet, with tons of options that I am only slowly discovering at the pace of my limited Japanese decryption abilities (the whole interface is entirely in Japanese). Of course, it has all kind of nifty features, including a built-in camera that can take pics and short videos…

It also comes email-equipped, so the whole deal was “simply” to put together a nice little bridge to post these pictures in a special weblog that can be seen either as a separate weblog or as a side bar to this one…
Oh, and did I mention that it even display a small map if I send in GPS info generated by my phone? yea, it also has a GPS built-in.

I won’t get into the details of the implementation itself, except to say it was pretty gory, involved lots of small hacks and with dead pieces of code scattered all over the floor. I also made heavy use of this very handy perl script, although I had to move lots of stuff around to fit my needs and limitations…

Incidentally, this great piece of code was written by Dav Coleman, who used to be roommate with Cheu Koh (a friend of mine who seems to be somewhere in between Singapore and Sao Paulo at the moment). His girlfriend, Mie, used to have a really cool moblog where she posted pictures of her life in Tokyo, which she keeps doing from SF, in her new moblog. Her moblog was the first of the kind that I saw, about a year ago, when I moved to Tokyo…

I’ll try and release any useful piece of code I might have hacked for this, as soon as I have had a chance to clean the mess…

Anyway, thanks to this new addition, I’ll probably be posting a lot more pics in the near future…

by ·Comments Off on Touring Japan with a van and loudspeakers

 

You would think in a country were talking aloud in the subway is barely tolerated and speaking on your cellphone strictly forbidden, there would be some sort of strict control on what you can do with a speaker-equipped van.

 

Oddly enough, it is considered rather rude to hold a conversation at a regular voice level in a public space, but absolutely ok to blast your loudspeakers in the early morning and drive round the block. And I literally mean round the block as said car-driving loudspeakers users ensure you don’t miss whatever essential stuff they got to say by usually driving a dozen times around your block… Just in case you’d have managed to accidentally sleep through the first eleven times.

 

I guess it would be somewhat comforting to know that the asshole who wakes you up at dawn with his trite message repeated over and over is out of voice by noon. But there’s no such hope as, of course, the whole thing is merely a stupid recorded message looping on and on, while they drive around or, worse yet, as they park and start reading their manga or go get some food.

 

Overall, there are three main categories of such vans in Japan, each of them differently annoying, each of them with a different agenda:

 

The most tolerable ones are the street vendors, who basically do the same as in most other countries: trying to grab the customer’s attention by any means necessary. These usually don’t move too much, they just park somewhere and open their portable food stands while the speaker blasts some inane song about their delightful fried sweet potatoes (these songs are so strange, I used to think they were some kind of religious chants until I got to understand their food-related lyrics).

 

There are also politicians… Who do not seem afraid to wake up their constituents to remind them they exist. The ridiculous practices of local political campaigns in Japan would deserve an entry of its own. Altogether, it has very little to do with passing on the slightest political message (even by already ludicrously low US standards), much more to do with standing, along with two or three assistants, at the exit of the local subway station and bow to every passerby while just telling them who you are. Of course, in order to complement their branding for bigger elections, they’ll have vans touring the street and broadcasting the exact same one-liner all day long over their loudspeakers. These vans are usually staffed by a handful of young chirpy japanese girls who will wave and blow kisses to every moving object in a 2 miles radius. Last time I crossed one of these, the fact I was alone in the street and quite obviously not in any power to cast a vote in the local elections did not deter them from sending me such a demonstration of electoral love…

 

Then, there are the ubiquitous right-wing nationalist sinister black vans… These are a bit more complicated and much less harmless.

Basically nostalgic of the days of yore, when the sun was rising all over Asia and the emperor still a living God, this bunch of powerful wackos spend most of their time chanting old military songs, demanding a return of the imperial regime, calling for immediate war against Korea or claiming their hatred of such or such thing. One of their typical strategy is to go park in front of a specific premise (house of a liberal politician, office of a reporter who dared mention some of the exactions committed by Japanese military during WWII, any company they have a reason to dislike…) and blare fanatical aggressive comments meant to “bring shame” on their target. These tactics usually succeeds in that targeted businesses will usually see their frequentation dwindle, since, despite their disdain for these fanatics, most Japanese will still prefer to pass their way and go somewhere else.
It is said that the reason these people and their unusually aggressive ways are tolerated in otherwise politically quiet Japan is that they have very strong ties with high-ranking officials, but also more importantly with yakuzas: on one hand, yakuzas never made a secret of their historical fondness for nationalism, while on the other hand, the black vans strategies are a good way to put pressure on any business unwilling to cooperate, without resorting to fully illegal means (just by “shaming” them). Although it seems like both groups would tend to disassociate from each other these days.

 

I am pretty lucky: the street just down my window in my new flat only admits limited traffic, but the vicinity of bigger avenues is enough to provide me with delightful wake-up to the sound of Mishima-wannabes brailing their twisted anachronical dreams at least once a week.

by ·Comments Off on The fascinating world of Geodesy

Been busy becoming a real cartographer these last few days… Much less straightforward than I would have thought (duh) but also quite interesting.

I would seriously advise the casual reader to stop reading right here and skip this entry altogether, if you are scientifically-challenged or otherwise adverse to weak attempts at explaining the wonders of the world we live in through mathematics and geometry.

The idea is to implement a few DB components (within a much bigger system I am working on) that will generate nifty little maps complete with geopolitical data and layers containing additional sets of relevant data. All this for environmental audit (risk assessment) purposes.
Example: you want the details of a project involving the site of some kindergarten school precisely located at: Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa-ken, 4-14-2. You will first go and fetch geographical coordinates (e.g. lat/lon) matching this street address (using a geocoder component), then will extract a map of appropriate scale/size/boundaries from our map files, and finally will edit the map by placing waypoints for any other relevant data (the nuclear plant 2 miles north, the prison facilities across the street, the military training field 300 meters south etc etc).

Seems easy, doesn’t it?

Well, it’s not.

God, who would have thought that placing a point of a certain latitude/longitude on a map would be so hard…
Actually, who would have thought lat/lon measurements depend entirely on who you are talking to and where they stand in the chaotic world of geodetic standards…
My poor innocent little self was under the foolish impression that, once you get the appropriate geocoder that will spit out the lat/lon for any of your entries, you just apply a bit of high-school geometry to convert that into usable Cartesian coordinates that lets you place some “you are here” marker on your map and everything is fine… Well, it turns out that not two measurement are compatible together, in the wild world of cartography.
First, whatever lat/lon you got, it’s meaningless as long as you do not know in what datum (see below) it is measured. Same goes for the map, which is only valid for measurement made in the same datum, and, of course, same for conversions between lat/lon measurement and any usable Cartesian coordinates (what you’ll use on a flat map). The latter requiring the use of pretty ugly mathematical formulae that sent me back to the worst days of my topological math studies.

The essence of the problem lies in two things:

  • The fact that, not only the Earth is a very imperfect sphere (flattened at the poles, as most everyone knows), but the mathematical parameters of its exact shape (an ellipsoid) were until fairly recently not precisely known and only reached through approximations. This added to other parameters affecting the way the Earth may appear to cartographers (uneven gravity repartition, magnetism etc) meant people only had approximated models for the Earth (what is called a geoid).

  • Because of the lack of precision in defining the general Earth shape, any measurement done using a certain geoid would lose its accuracy as you’d get farther from the point of origin of your measurements. To insure they were getting accurate distances and useful results, cartographers throughout the world decided to use an origin within their own country for their work, hence the birth of a few dozens different coordinate systems (such as NAD27 and NAD83 for the US).

The combination of a specific geoid and a coordinate system is what we (that is, me and my good friends at the International Geodetic Association) like to call a datum. There are tons of them (each country usually has a few, as both geoid and coordinate systems were refined over the years).

The geoid used is extremely important, as it directly affects the projection. Projection is basically the transformation of 3d coordinates (e.g. lon/lat and altitude) into 2d coordinates that can be used on a flat map. The map itself needs to be projected, and that’s where it can become ugly, as there is, to put it simply, no easy way to properly squash a pseudo-sphere into a perfectly flat accurate representation.

The problem might be presented as such: if I draw a small map of the world on an orange and give you a knife and ask you to get me a flat map of this world… How do you do?

Of course, there are tons of ways to go about it and a good way to picture them is to imagine you have a semi-transparent earth globe, a flashlight and big sheet of paper that you can fold in any shape you want (basically, it’s gonna be a cone or a cylinder). You then shine the flashlight through the globe and can see the projection on the paper. Something a bit like that.

As a result of all this, you must imperatively know in which datum any of your data/maps has been measured. Any conversion (including from lat/lon to flat map Cartesian coordinates such as UTM) involves the datum.

To spice things up a little, one must add that there is now a more or less universal datum with a geocentric origin and a geoid defined using the latest information provided by satellite cartography. It is called World Geodetic System (WGS84). This is the datum in which GPS coordinates are usually given (or, actually, one of his close cousin, as there are a few different variations, depending on the precision required, but let’s not be too picky here).

All in all, these coordinates issues and specificities of each country (just for fun: in Japan alone, there is about two or three datums commonly used on top of the international one) makes it a fascinating nightmare to do any kind of cartography works with real-life data, involving enough mathematics to wake-up deeply repressed fearful memories of frightening topology classes…

And I thought this would only be boring down-to-earth computer stuff…