And more than likely, so should you. But before you do, I have a couple of highly recommended cross-refs for you, one very silly and one deeply moving.

Edit: Add one more to that list, a clear and explicit legal explanation of why all of these investigations are - in the eyes of the law, if not yet the courts - neither premature nor paranoid. Highly recommended. This is a long post - Read the rest.

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

The Honourable Judy Sgro, P.C., M.P.
Minister of Citizenship and Immigration
Ottawa Canada K1A 1L1
Tel: 1 613 954 1064
Fax: 1 613 957 2688
Minister@cic.gc.ca
sgro.j@parl.gc.ca

Dear Minister Sgro;

Re: President George W. Bush proposed November 30th 2004 visit to Canada.

We wrote to Prime Minister Martin on November 19 2004 protesting the invitation of President Bush to Canada on the grounds of the President's flagrant commission of the most serious crimes against international law. Our letter is enclosed.

As that letter indicates, many of the crimes of which President Bush stands accused are crimes under Canadian law, specifically under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act.

We are writing to you now to remind you that these crimes render President Bush inadmissible to Canada under our immigration laws. Because responsibility for the operation and enforcement of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act lies with you and your Ministry, we are calling on you to advise the Prime Minister of this fact and to insist that he rescind this invitation out of respect for our laws.

As you know, section 35 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, 2001 2001 provides as follows:

35. (1) A permanent resident or a foreign national is inadmissible on grounds of violating human or international rights for (a) committing an act outside Canada that constitutes an offence referred to in sections 4 to 7 of the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act;

Paragraph 2 of section 35 allows for exceptions to be made for other classes of inadmissible foreign nationals 'who satisf[y] the Minister that their presence in Canada would not be detrimental to the national interest.' However, these exceptions specifically do not apply to those who have committed acts constituting offences referred to in sections 4 to 7 of the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act.

Section 6 of the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act incorporates by reference all international crimes against humanity and war crimes, and, explicitly, all crimes enumerated in Articles 7 and 8(2) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Section 7 of the Act places special responsibility on `military commanders' and other `superiors' for crimes committed by their subordinates that they knew of, or were criminally negligent in failing to know of, and with respect to which they did not take necessary and reasonable steps to prevent.

Section 33 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act specifically provides that `facts that constitute inadmissibility under sections 34 to 37 include facts arising from omissions and, unless otherwise provided, include facts for which there are reasonable grounds to believe that they have occurred, are occurring or may occur.'

The evidence of President Bush's past and ongoing criminality is overwhelming. A recent editorial in the Washington Post commented on some of the now well known facts regarding the chain of memoranda from the President and white house White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, now Attorney General, that led to the use of torture by the US Armed Forces.

These memoranda clearly establish the President's culpability for the torture used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons. We also refer you to the many careful reports prepared by respected human rights organizations, journalists and scholars and also to recent decisions by US Courts, some of which are referenced in our letter to the Prime Minister and others we have listed below. These clearly provide far more than `reasonable grounds to believe' in President Bush's legal and moral responsibility for the gravest crimes under numerous provisions of the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act.

We are sending a copy of this letter directly to the Interdepartmental Operations Group (IOG), the agency through which, we have been given to understand, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, the Department of Justice and the RCMP investigate all allegations of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

We remind you of the proud claim made by Canada's War Crimes Program in its 2003-2004 report that, "The policy of the Government of Canada is unequivocal. Canada will not be a safe haven for persons involved in war crimes, crimes against humanity or other reprehensible acts."

The time is short before President Bush's intended visit, so we are asking that you or your representative meet with us immediately to explain the action you intend to fulfill your obligations under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

Sincerely,
Michael Mandel and Gail Davidson
on behalf of Lawyers against the War (LAW) a Canada-based committee of jurists and others with members in thirteen countries.

cc. Interdepartmental Operations Group,
war_crimes-crimes_de_guerre@rcmp-grc.gc.ca

This is a long post - Read the rest.

Hmm. Tin foil hat time again, just briefly... to acknowledge elegance in analysis, if nothing else. Spurious or not.

A programmer interested in the vote fraud issue took a detailed look at one of the reported bugs due to the e-voting thing, and they make his debugger antennae twitch. Seeing it, I agree... particularly because the programming error he discusses is one I personally made, not three weeks ago, resulting - in my case - in a 300MB text-data file. (Oops.)

The post can be found here, but I recommend staying clear of that site in general... too little reasoning, too many tin foil hats. I'll summarize below.

The error occurred in a precinct named Gahanna, in Ohio, where the e-voting software gave an obviously erroneous result: Bush 4258, Kerry 260, Total Voters 638. Um, oops, yeah. They're pretty sure the actual Bush result was 365 votes (leaving 13 as undervotes or other candidates).

What caught this particular programmer's eye, however, was how odd such a bug result is... almost certainly not data corruption or hardware failure, as it yielded a Kerry vote percentage which made sense given polls and so forth (ignoring the exit polls thing), but nonsense for Bush's vote. Not utter nonsense, however, which is even odder. A normal programming foulup would tend to produce a result more along the lines of Bush 65,535 or the like - it's unusual to have it end up out by a large amount (by addition) but a small amount (by boundary conditions on powers-of-two math).

He did, however, find one way it could have happened. He wrote a program which would take every tenth non-Bush vote, and switch them into Bush votes... and then he screwed it up in a fairly normal programming mistake. If you denote Bush votes as B and Kerry votes as K, then his program should have been stealing votes using "B = B + 1; K = K - 1;" as the relevant code. The kind of error I'm talking about is the kind where you add cumulative totals instead of single instances... where the mistake would turn this into "B = B + K; K = K - 1;" instead.

Numerically, what he gets out of it is the result the machine returned on November 2.

Once you look into his logic, it's a little less convincing; turns out his program is somewhat dependent on the order of votes cast, and could return any number of results (all on the same close order as this value). However, though this weakens the elegance of the analysis, the mathematician in me applauds this anonymous White Knight for cleverness anyway; he can debug my code anytime. Because this is, indeed, chillingly plausible.

Two things that his analysis doesn't note, though, which IMO strengthen rather than weakening his hypothesis. The first one is that the "steal every tenth vote" isn't the only way in which such a cumulative-count error could exist; this is why it's a common error, there are several ways it could happen. Another way it could occur would be for this machine to have been programmed to subtract a small number (one, five, ten, whatever) of votes from Kerry, and add them to Bush... and to accidentally trigger that subroutine repeatedly at intervals throughout the day. About once every ten, fifty, or one hundred votes, say, instead of just once. Again this is an easy, easy mistake to make, depending on how the trigger condition is built. Same basic outcome. The other is that the effect of the underlying manipulation is, again, comparable (rough order) to the size of the exit poll discrepancies.

Unfortunately for him, that's all this can probably ever be - a hypothesis. It's supportable... different machines do seem to get issued different patches and releases of the software, this is observed from the companies' behaviour already... but not defensible. Nine points for elegance; one for provability.

On other fronts, things are starting to heat up over the possibility of fraud. The U.S. officially condemns electoral fraud in the Ukraine; eyebrows go up. Reports on the suspect events continue to come in, and begin to pop up higher and higher up the media food chain. Miami-Dade vote percentages remain the same to within 0.03% on both the intermediate and final vote results; graphs of voter suppression such as (click for full size):

...and, over the weekend, the Kerry campaign actually weighing in on the affair - albeit wafflingly - and Jesse Jackson doing so with vigour.

Still not holding my breath. But definitely not getting bored and wandering away...

This is a long post - Read the rest.

It's official. She gets it from her daddy. Aria has never lost a game of Candyland in her life, continuing an unbroken 12-0 or so winning streak with literally skunking her mother and me last night - we made it to where she was on turn two, only shortly before she won the game.

(For those who've never played it - the element of skill in Candyland is slightly less than that involved in playing, say, a slot machine.)

And, by the way, there is no rule thirteen, dammit. This is a long post - Read the rest.

It can be remarkably difficult to find considered, level-headed criticisms of the ideology of free market fundamentalism - the unsupported belief that completely free markets are the best way to handle anything. Having run across Year Zero by Naomi Klein, I recommend it to those who are interested in the downsides of Milton Friedman's policies... it's a stunningly well-written indictment of behaviour taken straight out of those same books.

Speaking of Naomi Klein, the Princess is showing The Take at 1PM today, and I don't know if this is its last show of this run or not. (It's only being shown on 1PM matinees, Saturday and Sunday, but I can't find out when the run ends.) I would encourage you to find out whether it'll still be running next weekend; review to follow once I get back. This is a long post - Read the rest.

I know, it's a freaking strange thing for me to say on my blog, and it is only somewhat true. But, in keeping with the fascinating topics which seem to have become a mainstay of this blog, once I discovered this site, it became necessary to at least post with the above subject line in describing it. I'll give a slightly more in-depth explanation in a sec, or you could go there and read it directly - an easily-digestible summary can be found here.

It's called the Simulation Argument, put forth by an Oxford philosophy postdoc named Nick Bostrom.

He argues (I'll paraphrase and shift the emphasis a bit, here) that it is logically inconsistent to hold all four of the following to be simultaneously true:

1. It is possible, given enough computational power, to render in simulation a human mind, body, and a world for that person to live in.
2. A species at our level of maturity has a hope in hell of ever surviving to become technologically mature.
3. Among technologically mature civilizations - or even individuals in such civilizations - capable of running such a simulation, more than a vanishingly small percentage will actually choose to do so.
4. There is probably a spoon. More specifically, you assert that the odds that you are a "real" person, and not a simulation, are better than your odds of winning the lottery without a ticket.

The first point is one which I would defend extremely strongly; it is, certainly, a point of faith on my part. There being no proof one way or the other as to the existence of a 'soul' which is outside of the comprehension of science, I will choose to default to disbelief. And as such, the biochemical and bioelectric operations involved in my being are all of a nature which it is perfectly reasonable to simulate, given enough processing power. You can choose to disagree with this, in which case - see the subject line - there is probably a God, and you may stop now.

The second point is again impossible to prove or disprove; for instance, it may be that (as is speculated by the protagonists, briefly, in David Brin's Earth) there exists a deadly science whose discovery almost invariably leads to that species' extinction. Bostrom puts it well: "Let us hope that this is not the case."

Fasehood on the third point is (IMO) bloody unlikely, though it could be argued. Perhaps the changing values which accompany such science tend strongly to prohibit this behaviour, whether it be for reasons of recreation, research, art, or anything else. Perhaps widespread xoxing can lead only to destruction of the species per the previous item, or else to a particular regard for the quality of uniqueness which would make setting up a world-simulation inconceivable. But it seems improbable to me that one would hold this to be true in preference to the others, unless given some good reason to do so.

The fourth point follows from some mathematics in the full version of the paper, which I have not yet vetted for myself but which I am willing to trust the editors of Philosophical Quarterly to have done for me. But in essence, the point is that the universe has a known-finite mass, and a known-finite capacity therefore for real bodies; the Matrix, or its thematic descendants, has either an infinite capacity, or at least an incredibly higher capacity, for minds. Subdivide that by more than an infinitesimal number of species which reach technological maturity, and by the number of simulations they choose to run, and the odds of you being a real person are still much lower than the odds of Elvis still being alive today.

Freaky.

This last, of course, implies that - again - the universe was probably designed... not brought into being by random chance. There is probably a God. Sure, it may be the inconceivably-far-off equivalent of a postdoc or a bored eight-year-old. But nonetheless, it is unreasonable to assume that you're living in the miniscule probability that is the actual, original, material world, brought about (if you like) by chance.

Bostrom then makes some really, really neat points about what this means. It does not mean that you're ever likely to see through the veil of it; this is simply weak thinking, and in fact I would find it a stretch that one could ever bring about proper sentience in a simulation, if it was so shoddy that your senses could then find a loophole. Nope, not gonna happen, not unless the designer built in (or steps in to provide) deliberate evidence to this effect.

But it does mean that you can try to guess at the mind of God. This may be nearly as inconceivable; we don't yet know how much technology it may take, to achieve this effect, to construct the base technologies (robust nanotech?) which would enable the proper computational tools. But one of the alternatives, certainly, is that the Matrix isn't all that far away - that we will reach such tech capabilities, before altering our minds and values systems into total unrecognizability. (Or that another species, if you prefer, would be likely to still show some similar values to our own - the Golden Rule, maybe - even upon reaching such a point.)

So to whatever extent you think you can predict the mind of the designer... you can try to predict the Why and How of their creation. If you do not think that such a mind exists... then either you should go buy a lottery ticket and quit your day job in anticipation of a sure win, or you should decide which of #2 or #3 above you think is false.

Yai-i. This may take me a while to absorb...

This is a long post - Read the rest.

For those of you not tracking this stuff, but nonetheless interested, here's the score:

1. The exit poll discrepancies remain somewhat smelly, and some studies make much ado of these, but I find the evidence still not altogether convincing, merely suggestive. (The latter site is worth reading in depth, if this interests you... excellent, unbiased coverage.)

2. More recent kerfuffles surround efforts which don't rely on the exit polls and nonetheless find a rather foul stench in the air as well. This paper's methodology has, however, been attacked, and some of the points it finds questionable are ones which I (with minimal effort on research) have had answered to my satisfaction.

Nonetheless, I'd call this the current flag-bearer for the basic troublesome question, "Why is it that every anomaly found, even by the more responsible and bipartisan investigators, favours Bush?"

3. Ohio is looking messy. Hearing after hearing, deposition after deposition shows a hugely systematic pattern of voter suppression, mostly in the form of lineups - American's don't get the day off to vote, and three or more hours in line is often more than your job is worth - in primarily Democratic districts, and not in others. Shorting their voting machines, generally, while keeping a decent number in storage and never deploying them at all.

My question is what they can do with it... how do you 'recount' the votes that were never cast because Blackwell violated the guideline (one machine per 100 people) by some three- to ten-fold? Turnout hit 70-75% in some counties... but multiplying the time allowed (5 min. per voter) by the machines provided, gets you enough for maybe 40-50% turnout tops, before close of polls. Nasty. And this is just the cleanest, simplest suppression tactic... some of them are downright brutal.

Need we mention how much harder it would be to make a properly educated populace fall for this sort of thing? No? Good.

4. Bev Harris's group, Black Box Voting (dot org) is either running a monkeyshow of beyond Michael-Moorish proportions, stunting for the public with heavily spiced halftruths, or else they've uncovered something truly vile, way beyond stinky and straight on into pestilential and in need of cauterization. Their website has been updated only infrequently... I would guess that whichever hypothesis is correct, they're bloody busy just now. Keep an eye on this one, folks. It could be the spike that cracks the turtle's egg open.

So... yeah. Yuck. Our cousins to the south are as fucked-up as I had feared they were. And probably shit out of luck or recourse, more's the pity. Well, my friends, there are a few things we can potentially do to help. After all, helping your neighbour is a Canadian kind of thing... This is a long post - Read the rest.

If the person who borrowed my C.S. Friedman's 'Fae' trilogy - Black Sun Rising, When True Night Falls, and Crown of Shadows - happens to read my blog, I'd like them back. Yum. One of my favorite authors - pity he(?)'s not more prolific. This is a long post - Read the rest.

The magazine IEEE Spectrum was sitting around in the lunchroom yesterday, and I got to read a fascinating article on the application of engineering theory to human longevity. Neat, neat article, with remarkable implications.

It involves something called "Reliability Theory"... quite simply, the study of the way complicated things break down, in a statistical manner. In this context, aging is in fact used, to describe the increasing probability (over time) that the object will completely fail. The simplest example of aging would be a system with just one triply-redundant component. Each instance has a fixed and constant - nonaging - likelihood of failure, in any given span of time.

There's a chance that, in that span of time, all three will simultaneously fail and the device will die; it's just small. But as time goes by, the odds that one of them will fail become cumulatively larger - and with one failed, the odds of the other two failing simultaneously go up. After a while, the odds of 2/3s of the instances having failed goes up, and the odds of the device failing go up again... they become equal to the odds of a single instance failing, in the extreme.

The interesting thing is the shape of these graphs. Start with a hundredfold-redundant system vs. a merely threefold-redundant one, and the former will naturally have a much longer working life... but if you look near the far end of the curve, the odds of each one failing have converged to the same number. That is, after a hundred years, there will be many more of the hundredfold systems left around than of the threefold systems - but if you have a functioning one that's that old, they're both equally likely to fail in the next six months, regardless of what it started as.

The same thing apparently holds true of countries. The odds of dying in the ages 20-25 is way higher for Nigerians than Swedes... but the odds of dying in the ages 95-100 is basically the same. Also, like the triply-redundant system reduced to just one component, the odds of someone dying between 100 and 101 are about the same as the odds of someone dying between 120 and 121; once you make it to that point, the curve flattens out.

The one discrepancy is that a multiply-redundant mechanical system, after the periods of "break-in" (high initial odds of failure, of being a lemon) and "normal working time", follows a straight-line curve of (log of failure rate) vs. (log of time). Humans have a similar curve, including a sharp rise at the very beginning (infant mortality rates), dropoff to "normal odds" (ages 5-15 or so), and then an aging curve where the odds of death increase... but they go as a straight line on (log of death rate) vs. (time). Not the same graph!

However, the two models do converge if you switch ways of looking at it... because the standard machine-longevity assumption is that all components start out working properly.

The authors then redid the model with a machine that was (say) ten times as redundant, but starts out with a whole bunch of its parts already failed. Similar total lifetime expectations... but the curve is a different shape. It's linear in (log of failure rate) vs. (time), like the human mortality curve.

The implication is that evolution did not give us good engineering, it gave us a jury-rig job; we take a lot of chromosomal and other lasting damage, in the womb and during infancy. So what we live out the rest of our lives on is a bunch of massively-redundant but defect-ridden systems. The mathematical implication of this is very interesting:

If we can reduce the failure rate of systems during this time, life expectancy can increase disproportionately.

Folic acid may turn out to be a good case of this. If your mom took folic acid supplements during pregnancy, this helps prevent some of the defect modes. We do it to reduce the rates of overt damage to the child, as seen after birth... but the acid does so by reducing those pre-birth systems failure rates on the cellular level, so the reduction in "immediate failure" may well be expected to presage a substantial increase in overall longevity, because you're moving toward the machine-longevity model which goes as (log of time)! If you can stop X% of initial defects, this will increase your longevity by more than X%. And if you can stop another Y%, the effect will accelerate further.

Experiments with mice fed antioxidants (which help prevent chemical damage to DNA) during gestation seem to agree with this; they've had some brutally long-lived mice out of this kind of process.

So two lessons out of this one. Primus, we may be able to increase longevity substantially... but those who benefit are likely to be those children as yet unborn. For us, the clock is already mostly set, and all we can do is treat symptoms. Secundus, the critcism of mothers who take "just a little drink", or otherwise do anything which increases the odds of fetal problems even a tiny bit ought to be far fiercer than it is... because the near-term odds of problems we can see are just an indicator. The background processes they result from will also shorten their expected lifespan. Shorten it a LOT.

Mostly, here, I'm preaching to the choir... but the choir has a role in singing to the world, and I'd encourage you all to take a much stronger stance on this sort of thing. Anything that helps (folic acid) or hurts (alcohol, street drugs, some prescriptions) a fetus will have its impact not only on the baby, but - more strongly! - on the lifespan of the man or woman it will become.

This is a long post - Read the rest.

You know, by the time I actually write Heresy, the only thing new about the world it describes will be the Ruin.

Holy shit, the world is cool. This is a long post - Read the rest.

Tonight, this blog has quietly polymorphed into a vastly more sophisticated entity. Well, not really - nor is this post, itself, very long, despite what the link said. But in the background, we have added several elements of functionality, using all kinds of neat tech.

Using PHP, we now include a second blog... the Quote of the Day. This is a fully discrete second blog, displayed on the same page as the first. My immediate blogging goal is to keep this one updated daily, even if the main blog isn't.

Using CSS, we can now show/hide the bulk of long posts. I'm DAMN proud of this mod, because I was able to find three distinct tutorials on different ways to do this trick, and all of them leave a "Read More" link on every post, whether you invoked the tech on that post or not. I want it to show up only on those posts which actually use the feature... and you would not believe how bloody tricky it is. One thorough backrub to the first one who can describe how I did it.

Coming up later tonight, if it works, XML technology brings you webfeed (aka RSS feed) tech, so that anyone who wants to can monitor whether this blog has updated without having to check. That's right... detect lollybloggers at range! Soon to come will be links to tutoriae on how to pull this off, so that I no longer have to check your lollyblogging manually. Yes, you.

This is all research, honest. Research for the DemosFire project. For those who haven't received this document, it's a funky plan of mine which has about eighty elements to it, but is ultimately a plan to create an implementation engine for powerful online discussion and direct democracy. For those who have, research indicates that about half of the elements I dreamed up for this, are not completely new... but in combination, and combined with the ones which do appear to be unprecedented, I'm still really pumped about this project. To put it into terms I'm just starting to learn, I believe that the DemosFire engine may turn out to be a webfeed (RSS feed) reader, with a weighted-volume standard all its own, and an encrypted Trust Scheme feed for the direct democracy part.

As bonus points for those who did receive the document, answer me this:
With Trust Schemes in place, do "Motions" aka "Proposals" or "Initiatives" actually have to be marked as such? Clarify why, or why not.

This is a long post - Read the rest.

Just announced, Bigelow Aerospace will be backing a fifty-million dollar prize, as well as $1B in promised contracts (not necessarily to the one who gets there first, a smart move IMO), for a more ambitious private-spaceflight accomplishment. Five people, 400 miles, two full orbits, do it by 2010, and you have to demonstrate docking to their inflatable space station. No, I'm not kidding.

The catch? The contestant has to be an American company. Wholly private and with neither foreign ownership nor foreign location. Which is bloody short-sighted and irritating, but completely their privilege; I just hate to see private industry being unnecessarily protectionist.

Here's hoping that someone puts up a counterprize which is open to everyone but American companies, just to keep things global. Frankly this would be a good move for Canada, GB, the EU, and so forth, to front; it's in their long-term interest to not see the private space effort get centralized all in the US.

But let's not get distracted by the stupid nationalist clause. That's a billion dollars in private money, to the best competitor - not the first. Coooool. This is a long post - Read the rest.

Just a brief note for today... a quote, from Star. While maligning me in a fervid and untrue manner on her own blog; she is forgiven only because this response was so funny.

A secular humanist twist on an old saw...

"It was the dramatic necessity that made me do it, you see." - Star This is a long post - Read the rest.

Dave Gaider posted a cute map on his blog. I have one for him in turn:
This is a long post - Read the rest.

Hmm. This is interesting, and worth keeping an eye on. With a good stout grain of salt, as several of the comments point out, but nonetheless statistically suggestive.

In brief, what is being asserted (without sources quoted, but with the firmness of solid data and one not afraid to be checked back on), is this:

- There is a discrepancy between the exit poll results, and the actual results, in several states, but not all of them.
- In a number of states [list provided in the link], swing states with e-voting machines, the discrepancy is invariably ~5% in Bush's favour. It is asserted without proof that there are no examples of a discrepancy in Kerry's favour.
- In other states, swing states without e-voting (or with a paper trail), the discrepancy is much, much smaller - 0.1 to 0.5%. Unfortunately, this is quoted from a quite small sample of states (I can't tell if it's two or three, but not more.)
- The major networks have revised their exit poll data since the election, claiming "reweighting" of the data or giving no explanation at all for the change. Their exit polls now more closely reflect the 'results' of the election.

I want to see a more thorough look at this data, with the complete data set; this interests me. Purely in the name of justice, goddammit, if nothing else. (Does Kerry's concession render the whole thing moot?) It should be possible, given the known sizes of poll error bars and so on, to calculate the probability of these discrepancies (always in favour of Bush, etc) occurring randomly. Those error bars are, indeed, largish... but not so large that the systematic nature of the data doesn't beg that the calculation be performed.

The article also points out that exit polls are frequently used by election observers as one check on the integrity of an electoral process. Neither side of the argument cites sources for how large the discrepancies need to be, or what guidelines exist for this, or moreover what other indicators are used as well... but I am inclined to at least support the assertion that if a third world country showed this kind of discrepancy, election observers would be correct in asking some very tough questions.

The game may not be over yet. This flap may die down, as many of them will... but it may also be the first faint cry of something that becomes very much more. This is a long post - Read the rest.