Yucca Mountain Spotted Fever #3

One last follow-up to this whole Yucca Mountain / NRC / ASLB thing ...

I never did get a response back directly from Senator Inhofe, which isn't surprising.  A senator unlikely to respond to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who emails him or her, even if s/he does have a large staff.  I (naively?) hope they have better things to do, even if my e-mail was particularly well crafted.

But all is not lost: the NRC did take a vote, and the votes have become public.  In an effort to just get on with it, I'm just going to point you to this site, which has all the gory details, and continues to track the issue a lot closer than I will:

Nuclear Townhall

This whole issue would be more amusing if there weren't tens of billions of dollars at stake.

Yucca Mountain Spotted Fever #2

Back in February, I posted about the shenanigans that are taking place around the Yucca Mountain issue.  To summarize, the Department of Energy basically threw up its hands and said, "Forget it.  Burying spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain is becoming too much of a hassle, and we're going to go back to the drawing board."

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which has been dutifully processing and reviewing the DOE's Yucca Mountain request for the past 3 years, didn't want to get directly involved with this matter.  So the NRC asked the Atomic Safety Licensing Board (or ASLB, a particularly brainy division of the NRC) to look at the DOE's decision in detail and give a recommendation back to the NRC.  Makes sense, right?  "Here, go take a look at this thorny issue and tell us what you find."

In June 2010, the ASLB issued a statement (PDF), waving the "baloney" flag vigorously.  That pdf is one of the most brilliantly written pieces of governmental language I've ever read, and it truly gives me hope in the future governance of our country.  Seriously.  It's clear, direct, thorough, and actually readable -- if a bit long after page 16 or so.  It states:

For the reasons explained below, we conclude that Congress directed both that DOE file the Application (as DOE concedes) and that the NRC consider the Application and issue a final, merits-based decision approving or disapproving the construction authorization application. Unless Congress directs otherwise, DOE may not single-handedly derail the legislated decision-making process by withdrawing the Application. DOE’s motion must therefore be denied.

There are some other really juicy quotes in there.

Did Congress, which so carefully preserved ultimate control over the multi-stage process that it crafted, intend—without ever saying so—that DOE could unilaterally withdraw the Application and prevent the NRC from considering it? We think not.

So the ASLB came back to the NRC and said, "No Way."  Per the law, if Yucca Mountain is to be truly axed, it must be done by Congress.

And here's where it gets really interesting.

The NRC never officially took action on the ASLB's report.  And the NRC unilaterally decided to stop processing the Yucca Mountain application last week.

Why, oh why, would the NRC do this?  Its own brainy division told it that it couldn't stop the review, even if DOE wanted to.  One strong possibility is the lingering connection between the Chairman of the NRC, Gregory Jaczko, and Harry Reid, Senate Majority leader from Nevada who has tried to stop Yucca Mountain from being operated in Nevada at all costs.  Before becoming chairman of the NRC, Jaczko was Harry Reid's appropriations director.

Huh.

So, earlier this week, Senator James Inhofe from Oklahoma again restored my respect and hope in those who govern this country.  In a letter to each of the NRC Commissioners, he politely and directly asked two questions:

1. Have you voted on the ASLB's recommendation?  If so, when?
2. If not, when do you plan on voting?

This is brilliant in its simplicity: hold governmental organizations accountable.  I wish there was more of this.  I sent a letter to Senator Inhofe, congratulating him, and asking if he'd received any response from the commissioners.  No word yet, but I'll be happy to pass it along if I hear anything.

Fire, Sheep, and Fox

About a week ago, a new tool was released to the internet, called Firesheep.  To me, there's just something funny about the name.  Sheep are inherently cool, and fire implies something serious.  The juxtaposition is funny.

But the implications are serious. Firesheep allows a user to EASILY sniff traffic over an open WiFi network, and steal cookies -- basically, your login authentication for Facebook, Google, Amazon, Flickr, CNET, the New York Times, Twitter, yahoo, and a ton of other websites that don't use secure protocols like https or SSL.  A well-written demonstration of using this can be found here -- just plop yourself down at the nearest Starbucks and send polite warning messages to the 20+ Facebook and Amazon accounts you can access. Watch their response.

There's a big reason I put EASILY in the above paragraph in CAPITAL LETTERS.  Other tools for doing this (known as sidejacking) have been around for years (it was first demo'd at a BlackHat presentation in August of 2007), but none have never been as user-friendly and intuitive as Firesheep.  This is a plug-in for Firefox (hence the "fire" in firesheep), and someone's account can be accessed within about 10 seconds and a double mouse click.  It's that simple.  To quote an oft-used Apple idiom, It Just Works.

Many tech folks are dismissing this as yet another tool to exploit something we've already known.  And maybe they're right.  But I believe they're underestimating the value of making things user friendly.  The gold standard of this is Apple:

• They were not the first to invent the Personal Computer -- the window-based interface just made it easy to use.
• They were certainly not the first to invent the mp3 player -- they just made it easy to use, in a cool form factor.  
• They were not the first to invent the smart phone -- they just made it easy to use.

See a trend here?  I think Firesheep could develop the same way.  And although it may not appeal to everyday, innocent users of The Internets like you and me, I bet it has an incredibly strong appeal to pimply-faced technologically inclined teenagers.  And all it takes is some enterprising youth to camp out in a Beverly Hills Starbucks and wait for an unsuspecting celebrity to log in.  Instant tabloid news story, similar to the episode when Paris Hilton's smartphone got hacked over Bluetooth.

In a worst-case scenario, this would spook 95% of Facebook users, who run screaming from the site and dump their accounts before Facebook implements a solution.  Panics have happened on Wall Street many times; we're probably due for one on the Internet soon, too.

How to protect yourself against this?

• There's already a counter program out there called FireShepherd, but it's kind of brute-force and not very user friendly.  Or network friendly.  But it's better than nothin'.
• Make sure your gmail is set to always use https.

Just be aware of what's out there.  There's a whole lot of Not Privacy on the internet.

When your only tool's a hammer ...

... all the world looks like a nail.

The above quote is attributed to Abraham Maslow, and it rings true time and time again.  In this particular case, I think it applies to The Federal Reserve.

News flash for those who have been living under a rock: housing prices have NOT been rising indefinitely (as many investment products were designed to take advantage of), and when this pyramid scheme began to unravel (I love mixed metaphors), a ton of things happened very rapidly.  Credit markets dried up; countless business plans that were based on aggressive growth failed; countless more projects dried up or did not get funded in the first place, and unemployment shot up above 10%.  The Fed pulled the biggest lever it could, and dropped its lending interest rates like a rock:

Source: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/Economics/Interest-Rate.aspx?Symbol=USD

Look again.  The interest rate has been almost ZERO since January 2009.  Twenty months and counting.  Historically, it's usually around 5%, but was as high as 20% in March 1980.  Banks and other major financial institutions can borrow money for free.

This is a slightly indirect way of pumping money into the economy.  Allowing borrowers (big banks, in this case) to borrow money on the cheap is an attempt to loosen things up a bit in the financial markets, and hopefully stimulate new projects, new industries, and new jobs.

But it just hasn't been enough.  And here's the point of this post: the Fed is considering new ways of pumping more money into the economy.  They've got their hammer, and they're lookin' for nails.

What has been the result of the absurdly low interest rate over the past 20 months?

1. It has probably stemmed the loss of jobs in this country.  Sorry, I don't have a definitely source to cite for that; it's just my opinion.
2. It has not turned the economy around.  (See current unemployment rate.)
3. Large companies, given the opportunity to borrow large amounts of money basically for free, have been investing in themselves and buying back their own stock.

Let me underscore that "buying back their own stock" point: there has been $258 billion dollars in stock buyback this year, compared to $52 billion at this time last year.  And they're getting the money to do it from Uncle Sam.

Imagine the corporate boardroom discussions, happening all around the US:

Chief Financial Officer: "Hey, we can get a loan from XYZ financial institution for $2 billion at 0.1% interest per year.  That's the lowest cost of money, ever."
Chief Executive Officer: "Sounds like a good deal.  I want each of my division leaders to examine what they could do with an extra $500 million this year."

---THE NEXT WEEK---

Chief Financial Officer: "Boss, all of the divisions say they can start some projects, but can only estimate a return of 3-4% in the next year on our investment."
Chief Executive Officer: "What??!?  3-4% return on investment?  That's a miserable deal for our stockholders!  I expect our stock price alone will go up 10% this year!  Why would I invest in R&D at a 3-4% return when I can invest it in myself and make at least 10%?  The stockholders will be happier, too."

Hopefully I've made the point pretty clear by now.  The Fed has a hammer: the interest rate it sets when loaning Fed money to banks.  It's a really big hammer.  It can be very effective when the economy is chugging along.  But when it's sputtering, it's not a very effective hammer.

The road to recovery is not paved by giving money to corporations so they can buy their own stocks back.  That doesn't create new jobs, and it really only helps those people who already own vast amounts of stock.  It doesn't put bread on anyone's table that isn't already covered in filet mignon.  Instead, I think the Fed needs to find new ways to *directly* create new jobs, or provide better incentives that will push industry to create new jobs.  If the Fed can't do it, then stand back and let another government organization stimulate the economy.  This kind of "new thinking" isn't the message we've been getting from the Fed.

I'm worried about the "quantitative easing" measures that are bandied about now -- another fancy way of pumping money into the system.  They don't address the problem at hand, and they have a cost that we'll have to pay off (specifically, my generation) in the future.  And it didn't really work for Japan when they tried it before, but they're trying it again anyhow.

A hammer is a very poor choice of tool for a screw.  And the economy looks screwy to me.

The Singularity

There's a concept among futurists and science fiction folks known as The Singularity.  While there is no formal definition, it goes something like this:

Mankind's progress and rate of learning so far has been limited by the ability of our brains to process, assemble, and assimilate information.  There may come a time in the future when we build a robot or a software computer program that is, effectively, smarter than we are.  At that point, the pace and progress of learning is no longer bound by our brains.

That moment is known as the singularity.  After that moment, it becomes impossible for us to predict the future, because it grows faster than we can comprehend.  Vernor Vinge wrote about this in a 1993 article, but it was really first coined in an article from way back in 1965: "Speculations Concerning the First Ultimate Machine."  Since then, many books and articles have been written about it.  Business Week even had a blurb on it back in 1999, as they were making predictions for the 21st century.

I tell you all this as background, for it appears we're one step closer to this point: Carnegie Mellon has devised a computer that can read, and learn from, the internet.  Called NELL, for Never Ending Language Learner, it can browse and parse the internet, and form "beliefs" based on what's out there.

I freely grant that the internet is not the Paragon of Truth, and based on volume, NELL is more likely to emerge as a whiny teenager with a penchant for anarchy than it is to become a wise oracle.  But still: it can learn and process, and it can browse and internalize a whole lot more of the internet than you or I can.  With a few more years and a few more terabytes of memory, we could be in for a heck of a ride.

Google Day!

In about two weeks, we'll have an important date that I want to celebrate.  And I want the internet to help celebrate it with me:

10/10/10

That's right ... in about two weeks, Sunday, October 10th, 2010, will be all ten's.  The perfect score on Dancing With the Stars.  A unique manifestation of our base-10 counting system.  And, with a little mathematical manipulation, we can make it come out to a unique number:

Guess what that is?  It's a googol, which is an astoundingly large number. (I know I had to fudge it a little, but 10^[10^(10)] is just absurd.)  There aren't even a googol atoms in the universe.  But our dear friend Google stems from this number, in an attempt to convey how much information Google hopes to store.

There have been a few attempts to stage a Google Day in the past, but they didn't achieve the viral, internet-phenom level of something like, say, Boobquake.  I think this one is different than past Google Days because it has such significance on the calendar.

So on Google Day, pick your favorite Google-hosted website:

• This one
• The official Google blog
• Other blogs
• Google Labs

And visit it 10 times.  Or a googol if you're really patient.  Google will love the traffic.  And, oh, to celebrate, I might click on a few ads along the way.  --->

Failing Gracefully

The internet is broken.  I blame cascading style sheets.

To explain the above (somewhat inflammatory) comment, I need to explain something common to engineers.  A key attribute in almost any well-designed system is known as "graceful degradation" or that the system "fails gracefully."  In practice, this means designing the system such that, in situations where the inputs aren't 100%, the system notices this, and adjusts its output accordingly.

For instance, many laptops (in close coordination with the processors that run them) have different levels of output: when plugged into the wall, the computer will crank out as much performance as it can.  When on battery power the CPU will slow down a bit, and the screen might dim slightly to ease the power draw from the battery.  When the battery level gets below 10%, the CPU might go into a slower, power-saving mode -- slow, but still functional to allow you to get your work done and hopefully save your work.  It's at about this time that the computer starts throwing warning messages at you, along the lines of

"FEED ME."

Then, once battery power gets to around 1% or 2%, the computer will put itself to sleep (since you're apparently incapable or untrustworthy), in a last-ditch attempt to husband the tiny amount of juice left in the battery while it patiently waits for you to plug it back in again.

This is graceful degradation: decreasing output for decreasing input.

The internet, in its modern form and for the average user, does not fail gracefully.

This was brought to my attention recently when I was suffering through a bad wireless router.  Our computers would download the first part of a web page, then hang indefinitely.  *Very* frustrating.  The below picture is a screen shot where I've cut out the middle section (it was all white anyhow; you're not missing anything):

In this case, I was looking up what "aGPS" is, or "assisted GPS."  The fact that I'm using Safari on a mac is irrelevant; this malady affects all computers and all browsers.

Now look at the bottom: it says, "Loading," and that it's completed 70 of 85 items.  That seems like a lot; 70 of something should imply some level of content.  And yet, the screen is completely blank!  There is no information to display yet.

And here's where the internet doesn't fail gracefully: you have to load almost all of the content, almost all of the time, regardless of your connection speed and regardless of the quality of your connection.  I would think, in any intelligently designed system, the content would come first -- in this case, some text explaining the details of aGPS.  But, no, with the construct of Cascading Style Sheets, you have to load tons and tons of format first -- and the content comes last.

This is a shame, because the whole idea of CSS is to separate content from presentation.  But the internet doesn't prioritize the order in which it sends it to you.

This would happen all the time with our faulty router: it would load the first sections of a web page, then hang indefinitely.  Incredibly frustrating, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's suffered from this.  Sites designed for mobile viewing (on your cell phone or iPad, for instance) don't really get around this: they just cut down on the amount of formatting, but they still rely heavily on cascading style sheets.

End of rant.  This is a small detail that probably only affects a few people.  But for an entity that seems to take such interest in picayune things, when the website is down, it's incredibly frustrating and I'm surprised someone hasn't already done something about it.

Sometimes I use a text only browser, like Lynx or Lynxlet, just for fun.  Maybe we can overthrow the CSS overlords.

Driving in DC #5

The Borg is coming, and this is what it looks like in Washington, DC:

Yes, that's right, it's the Department of Defense's Mark Center, located just off of Exit 4 of Interstate 395 in Alexandria, VA.  If anyone hasn't seen it yet, the building is big and imposing.  Even as it was going up as just a steel skeleton, I would think, "Holy moly, that thing is huge."  It's only 17 stories, which by New York City standards is actually pretty low, but it's designed to hold over 6,400 employees and the site itself is 16 acres -- enormous by NYC standards.

And it's the impending influx of those 6,400 employees that makes this the "Driving in DC" entry.  The nearest exit for this building is off of Seminary Road, and that already isn't pretty around rush hour.  The Army's Traffic Plan (pdf) says they plan for 3,840 parking spaces and that 20% of employees will use the shuttle buses.  Other reports say the shuttle buses will shuttle to the Mark Center from the King Street, Ballston, Franconia/Springfield, the Pentagon, and West Falls Church metro stops.

I sincerely applaud the traffic engineers' efforts to tackle this really, really difficult problem.  Obviously, military planners want a centrally-located auxiliary office building that's near the Pentagon, but not AT the Pentagon. That means inside the Beltway ... and there just aren't very many locations within the Beltway.  But, aaugh, I don't think and extra 3,800 cars coming in and out of the Seminary Road exit are going to make for a more pleasant experience on I-395 at 5pm.  And no matter how you slice it, there is some serious left-turnage involved for those coming in from the south:

(The Google Maps photo is old and doesn't reflect the new construction over the past two years.)  Add to this the other 15,000 or so workers who are being relocated to Fort Belvoir, and I-95 becomes nearly impassable.  Ouch.

I'm not the only one who's concerned.  In May, Virginia representative Jim Moran stuck language into the 2011 Defense Spending Bill that would reduce the number of parking spaces available for the new Mark Center to 1,000, unless the Army could "fully mitigate the impact on local traffic."  I'm not sure that's a productive way to go about doing things, but I'm sure it got people's attention.

As for me, I plan to watch traffic snarl on the webcam when the site opens in a year or so.