FastForwardz

No Direction Home

See this film. It is playing in multiple slots, and in two parts, this week on PBS. This is much more than a biography of Bob Dylan; it is a history of a key time. If you're old enough, it'll make you proud to be an old hippy. If you're young enough, it'll give you a clue to what happened to your parents, and the country, back there in the early 60s. Scorsese is brilliant as usual. This is the good stuff. PBS at its best.

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan A Martin Scorsese Picture DOCUMENTARY PORTRAIT WILL AIR ON PBS'S AMERICAN MASTERS SERIES SEPTEMBER 26-27 The two-part film, which focuses on the singer-songwriter's life and music from 1961-66, includes never-seen performance footage and interviews with artists and musicians whose lives intertwined with Dylan's during that time. Dylan talks openly and extensively about this critical period in his career, detailing the journey from his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, to Greenwich Village, New York, where he became the center of a musical and cultural upheaval, the effects of which are still felt today.

American Masters . Bob Dylan | PBS

This is global warming

The ability to make predictions is the hall mark of a good scientific hypothesis. What ever the cause, the best models now predict that warmer oceans mean that powerful hurricanes are going to be more likely than in the past, and we are seeing it daily on the evening news. Here's an stunning prediction made exactly a year ago.

September 30, 2004

Global Warming Is Expected to Raise Hurricane Intensity

Global warming is likely to produce a significant increase in the intensity and rainfall of hurricanes in coming decades, according to the most comprehensive computer analysis done so far.

By the 2080's, seas warmed by rising atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases could cause a typical hurricane to intensify about an extra half step on the five-step scale of destructive power, says the study, done on supercomputers at the Commerce Department's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. And rainfall up to 60 miles from the core would be nearly 20 percent more intense.

Other computer modeling efforts have also predicted that hurricanes will grow stronger and wetter as a result of global warming. But this study is particularly significant, independent experts said, because it used half a dozen computer simulations of global climate, devised by separate groups at institutions around the world. The long-term trends it identifies are independent of the normal lulls and surges in hurricane activity that have been on display in recent decades.

The study was published online on by The Journal of Climate and can be found at www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/bibliography/2004/tk0401.pdf.

The New York Times

And now from today's news:

This is global warming, says environmental chief

Super-powerful hurricanes now hitting the United States are the "smoking gun" of global warming, one of Britain's leading scientists believes.

The growing violence of storms such as Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans, and Rita, now threatening Texas, is very probably caused by climate change, said Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Hurricanes were getting more intense, just as computer models predicted they would, because of the rising temperature of the sea, he said. "The increased intensity of these kinds of extreme storms is very likely to be due to global warming."

"If this makes the climate loonies in the States realise we've got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful situation."

Independent Online Edition

Obviously the Bush administration can't admit to the science behind Global Warming; after all, they've fired all the people in government that were qualified to speak on the subject:

Bush and company blinded by pseudoscience

Consider global warming. The collective work of thousands of prominent scientists has led to a strong consensus that man's activities have already led to a hotter planet and that these greenhouse gas emissions, if continued at expected rates, will threaten ecosystems and the stability of our climate. One can count on two hands the prominent contrarians who believe otherwise -- skeptics who rarely, if ever, publish in the established venues of scientific literature -- yet time and again the Bush administration has chosen to downplay the consensus views, instead substituting demonstrably poor science by these contrarians that protects corporations that have heavily contributed to the Republican Party. (Only very recently has the president, after journalists twisted his arm leading up to the Gleneagles Summit, even admitted that mankind is partly responsible for warmer temperatures, but absolutely no action is planned as a result.) The administration -- and senators such as Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma -- have stalled, diverted and ignored the mainstream consensus on climate change at every turn, Inhofe even having the audacity to call the overwhelming agreement on global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

Bush and company blinded by pseudoscience

Perhaps, as the Bushies would have us believe, Global Warming has nothing to do with 'human' behavior at all, and this is the work of some kind of "Intelligent Design"...if so I would suggest that global climate change is either the work a demented intelligence, or a very sadistic intelligence. It probably doesn't matter at this point, if this is part of a devine "plan", an inevitable consequence of solar fluctuation, or just the sad by-product of a long and ongoing pattern of denial in certain really dumb segments of humanity. Regardless of what we might have done, could have done, should have done, it appears now that we really are screwed.

Global warming 'past the point of no return'

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.

They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.

Independent Online Edition

Budget Space Travel

Investing wisely in space

These are the best investments we ever made in space science. Our unmanned missions are a brilliant example of how to use money wisely to gain knowledge. These missions are going far beyond their original designed limits to bring back fascinating and unexpected benefits. We seem ot have sent devices into space that have no particular end-of-life in sight. We could be snapping tourist pictures of these other worlds for decades to come.

Leave it to a tourist to climb to the highest point for a look around, and to head south for the winter.

Spirit rover has a field day on Mars

After slipping, sliding and slowly crawling its way to the top of a summit in the Columbia Hills, the Spirit Mars rover is having a field day gathering science and snapping imagery from the vantage point. Now at the crest of "Husband Hill," Spirit is master of its own domain. Before the winter season in Gusev, we plan to drive into the basin to the south of Husband Hill to regions where Spirit can ‘over-winter' on slopes that face north and thereby capture more solar energy," Relatively extensive areas with north-facing slopes are about 5,000 feet (1.5 kilometers) straight-line distance to the south of Spirit's current location,

Space.com

Exciting Changes on Mars

Whatever else, daily evidence collected by our erstwhile little rovers, combined with brilliant satelite photos from the Mars Global Surveyor overhead, is building a picture of Mars that is far from the static planet of our childhood textbooks. Mars is changiing before our eyes. NEW gullies are forming, as 'material' flows over the martian dunes! ...and we've got photos to prove it.

New gullies that did not exist in mid-2002 have appeared on a Martian sand dune.

That's just one of the surprising discoveries that have resulted from the extended life of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, which this month began its ninth year in orbit around Mars. Boulders tumbling down a Martian slope left tracks that weren't there two years ago. New impact craters formed since the 1970s suggest changes to age-estimating models. And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress.

JPL/NASA

Have we just discovered the first non-terrestrial ocean?

Meanwhile, on the Cassini mission to Saturn, evidence is growing that there is currently a 'liquid' ocean on Titan. The only catch is that this ocean appears to be methane.

Cassini Radar Images Show Dramatic Shoreline on Titan

Images returned during Cassini's recent flyby of Titan show captivating evidence of what appears to be a large shoreline cutting across the smoggy moon's southern hemisphere. Hints that this area was once wet, or currently has liquid present, are evident.

NASA

Blanco says feds pledged buses

Here's the answer to the question many have asked about those New Orleans school buses; the ones that were left standing in flooded parking lots.

Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina raged ashore, Gov. Kathleen Blanco still wants one question answered. Where were the buses? Hours after the hurricane hit Aug. 29, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced a plan to send 500 commercial buses into New Orleans to rescue thousands of people left stranded on highways, overpasses and in shelters, hospitals and homes. On the day of the storm, or perhaps the day after, FEMA turned down the state's suggestion to use school buses because they are not air conditioned, Blanco said Friday in an interview.

theadvocate.com: News - Blanco says feds pledged buses 09/18/05

Breast Tumors In Mice Eradicated Using Cancer Vaccine

Here's some good news for a change.

A team from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has shown that by using a cancer vaccine based on the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes, they can cure mice with established breast tumors. Cancer vaccines, which are more properly described as immunotherapy, work by boosting an immune response against tumor-associated antigens.

"We found that we can stop the tumor from growing out to 100 days, at which time we stopped measuring since this is a long time for experiments of this type," says Paterson. "The tumors stopped growing or went completely away." The researchers published their findings in the September 15 issue of The Journal of Immunology.

Breast Tumors In Mice Eradicated Using Cancer Vaccine

Let's take them to "higher ground"!

New Orleans and the gulf coast are a perfect opportunity for the application of visionary new communications technologies. If the government wants to do this reconstruction right they can turn Katrina's mess into a golden opportunity. Rarely does technology, government and opportunity coincide so well.

As crews rush to restore basic telephone and Internet services to areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, some executives, academics and analysts are urging a more ambitious approach: Make New Orleans and the surrounding areas super-connected communities, with advanced services that surpass what is available anywhere in the country, if not the world. With many poles and wires reduced to sticks and spaghetti, cell towers down, miles of streets still flooded, and parts of the region uninhabitable for the near future, these experts see the perfect opportunity to deploy new systems that otherwise might be too expensive or disruptive to build.

This will cost almost nothing on top of the cost of replacing the existing communications infrastructure, and it will catapult the region into the cyber-telecom stratosphere.

...Recreating New Orleans as a technology and communications mecca could be a key to its revival, drawing back shuttered businesses that are considering relocating and attracting new ones. In addition, he said, "there needs to be an intentional effort to make sure that these benefits extend to poor people directly."

The president says he wants to rebuild New Orleans on "higher ground"... here's a magnificent way to do it.

New Lines of Communication

Why is Bush taking "responsibility" after a week of dodging it?

Bush and responsibility

After a week of outright lying and backhanded finger pointing, why is Bush suddenly all over the news taking "responsibility" for the mistakes in the federal government's handling of the Katrina disaster? This is definitely not the way this president normally works. What's going on here? ...not what it seems.

Nonpartisan US House Judiciary Committee research report finds that the Louisiana governor took all the necessary steps to secure federal help:

"This report closes the book on the Bush Administration's attempts to evade accountability by shifting the blame to the Governor of Louisiana for the Administration's tragically sluggish response to Katrina. It confirms that the Governor did everything she could to secure relief for the people of Louisiana and the Bush Administration was caught napping at a critical time." In addition to finding that "...it would appear that the Governor did take the steps necessary to request emergency and major disaster declarations for the State of Louisiana in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina. (p.11)" The report found that: All necessary conditions for federal relief were met on August 28. Pursuant to Section 502 of the Stafford Act, "[t]he declaration of an emergency by the President makes Federal emergency assistance available," and the President made such a declaration on August 28. The public record indicates that several additional days passed before such assistance was actually made available to the State;

The Governor must make a timely request for such assistance, which meets the requirements of federal law. The report states that "[e]xcept to the extent that an emergency involves primarily Federal interests, both declarations of major disaster and declarations of emergency must be triggered by a request to the President from the Governor of the affected state";

The Governor did indeed make such a request, which was both timely and in compliance with federal law. The report finds that "Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco requested by letter dated August 27, 2005...that the President declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina for the time period from August 26, 2005 and continuing pursuant to [applicable Federal statute]" and "Governor Blanco's August 27, 2005 request for an emergency declaration also included her determination...that `the incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of disaster."

Here's the full US House Judiciary Committee press release:

http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/releases/katrinacrsreportpr91305.pdf

Of course, we've all had web access to the relevant documents from the Governor' office for over a week. So it was a bold lie for the administration to claim that the president didn't know what Blanco wanted.

Here's the governor's, August 26, declaration of emergency:

http://gov.louisiana.gov/2005%20%20proclamations/48pro2005-Emergency-HurricaneKatrina.pdf

Here's the governors, August 28, written request for federal Home Land Security help:

http://gov.louisiana.gov/Disaster%20Relief%20Request.pdf

Note the dates on these documents

Blanco repeatedly requested help from the federal government BEFORE the hurricane struck, and before the levees broke. The failure was clearly at the federal end. Bush was on vacation and his administration was totally dysfunctional in the face of the biggest public emergency in modern times. The facts presented by the Conyers committee are why Bush is suddenly taking "responsibility", The Conyers commission has blown the whistle on the White House spin machine. Bush has no recourse but to admit that he totally blew it.

Annotated reality

Here's an idea that I've been predicting for about 5 years. GPS coordinated virtual Post-it Notes; sticky notes for physical space. Soon you'll be able to leave virtual notes for others that are wirelessly attached to a location in GPS space. A phone installer might leave a note for the next installer at your house. A hiker could leave a warning on a dangerous trail. Helpful tips, warnings, invitations, you name it; think of it as annotated physical reality. Imagine what unhappy diners could do to a bad restaurant. Now if we could just get the kind of cell service they have in regular countries like Italy, Norway, Japan, or Turkey, we could make this work. Needless to say this kind of technology would have been very helpful on the gulf coast last week.

Digital Graffiti Service

Munich, Feb 2, 2005

In the future, cell phone users will be able to leave messages anywhere in the form of what might be termed digital graffiti. They will be able to post virtual messages referring to a specific location wherever they are needed. Siemens researchers have now created the technical basis and the computer programs for this “digital graffiti service.”

Post-its are exceedingly practical. They’re a handy way of letting people know if you’ve gone out quickly to shop or to lunch, or for reminding you to do things. However, you can’t stick these yellow memos in mid-air – at least not yet. But that will be possible in future with the digital graffiti from Siemens Corporate Technology’s research laboratory in Munich. Dieter Kolb’s team of specialists have developed computer programs that assign cell phone messages to specific locations. The user can leave a message, known as a digital graffito, at any geographical point. This is a kind of SMS attached to one spot. When the recipient reaches the defined point, the message appears on his or her display. Unlike the classic SMS, the message is not sent to the addressee as such, but is only activated when the addressee comes within a defined radius of the location specified for the graffito. Another difference is that, if required, the message can be read not only by one person but also by a number of cell phone users – like a real graffito plastered on a building wall. This allows a whole range of new applications, for example for special offers and advertising messages aimed at a large readership, or for making arrangements with friends

Siemens AG - Digital Graffiti Service.

The larger problem

The failure of FEMA to respond to Katrina in a timely way, and the criminal neglect of the Bush administration to adequately staff and provision FEMA for just such an emergency, is now having its expected result; a failure of confidence throughout the emergency preparedness hierarchy. We are now left to wonder when, and if, we would get emergency help if we ever needed it.

After watching the bedlam in New Orleans after Katrina, Washington area officials said they are concerned about how much help they would get from the federal government and how quickly it would come.

"For four years, we've been hearing from the feds that they are going to take charge so we can respond to any catastrophe that comes our way," said Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D). "And here's the first major test, and it's a failure. . . . I've lost confidence in [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] to come in and be part of the solution.

"We've got to take all the plans that relied on the federal government and throw them out and start over again," Duncan said.

Regional leaders held a news conference last week to kick off the $4.5 million National Capital Region Emergency Preparedness Campaign, urging residents to prepare kits with food, water and emergency supplies. In other words, residents again are being told to stock up on duct tape.

What exactly did we get for the billions spent on Homeland Defense?

Perhaps most telling was an incident in March, in which there was a false positive anthrax test at the Pentagon's remote mail facility and a similar alarm at Defense Department sites in Fairfax County. A report to Congress indicated that 900 Defense Department workers were treated with antibiotics without local health officials being consulted. The report also indicated poor communication between federal officials and some of the 20 jurisdictions that comprise the region. Vague chains of command also were faulted.

"What you had was the homeland security equivalent of the fog of war," Philip Schaenman, president of the private company hired by Virginia to review the incident, told Congress in April.

Terrorism Could Hurl D.C. Area Into Turmoil

What did we expect from the 'anti government' government of the Republicans, that they would build and manage a better government? By now we must know that the Bush administration is not even trying to be good at executing the basic functions of government. Quite the opposite, for the past five years they've been busy disassembling our domestic services as fast as possible.

The agency (FEMA) had become a highly professional organization during the Clinton years, but under Mr. Bush it reverted to its former status as a "turkey farm," a source of patronage jobs.

As Bloomberg News puts it, the agency's "upper ranks are mostly staffed with people who share two traits: loyalty to President George W. Bush and little or no background in emergency management." By now everyone knows FEMA's current head went from overseeing horse shows to overseeing the nation's response to disaster, with no obvious qualifications other than the fact that he was Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate.

All that's missing from the Katrina story is an expensive reconstruction effort, with lucrative deals for politically connected companies, that fails to deliver essential services. But give it time - they're working on that, too.

Point Those Fingers - New York Times

So where is all the money going?

Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President George W. Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast.

One is Shaw Group Inc. and the other is Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton.

Firms with Bush Ties Snag Katrina Deals - New York Times

Follow the money... right to Bush's friends, that's where the administration's real interest lies, not with the health and welfare of the public. The 'public' can just go out and stock up on candles and duct tape.

The most important decisions of our time