Politics

More on Dr. Ivins and Anthrax

The FBI is starting to walk-back some of it’s circumstantial evidence against
Dr. Ivins. It turns out that he did give them the correct sample and it was
just that the FBI messed up. In other words, he wasn’t trying to mislead them
like the criminal master mind the FBI is implying. Note: the strains did match
but, unlike the FBI’s claim, it’s possible that nearly a 100 people had access
to that particular strain.
Also, the envelopes that got traced to the post
office near his home turn out to be more widely available then originally
claimed.
F.B.I. Will
Present Scientific Evidence in Anthrax Case to Counter Doubts

But F.B.I. officials acknowledged at the closed-door
briefing, according to people who were there, that the sample Dr. Ivins gave
them in 2002 did in fact come from the same strain used in the attacks, but,
because of limitations in the bureau’s testing methods and Dr. Ivins’s failure
to provide the sample in the format requested, the F.B.I. did not realize that
it was a correct match until three years later.

In addition, people who
were briefed by the F.B.I. said a batch of misprinted envelopes used in the
anthrax attacks — another piece of evidence used to link Dr. Ivins to the
attacks — could have been much more widely available than bureau officials had
initially led them to believe.

Politics

Anthrax, Ivins, and Conspiracies

I’ve been following the Dr. Ivins suicide and the FBI accusations against him for being the Anthrax killer. I’m pretty skeptical that the FBI got the right person.
First, it sounds like he just didn’t have the tools or specific knowledge to create the Anthrax letters. The accusations are only sound from the perspective of someone that doesn’t quite get the technology: he’s an expert in Anthrax Vaccines so obviously an expert in Anthrax and he knows so much more about it then nearly everyone in the world therefore he can make a weaponized version of Anthrax.
It’s rather like accusing me of writing a computer virus and because I know so much about programming and operating systems. Compared to the average person and from the average person’s perspective it make sense. But when you look at the virus, it was written in Java and I’m a C++/C#/Python person. Sure, I could learn Java but everyone around me would know I was learning Java.
Read this for a little more perspective:
Anthrax Vaccine — posts by Meryl Nass, M.D.: Did Ivins have the knowledge and access to produce weaponized, dry anthrax

It is unlikely that Ivins knew how to prepare weaponized anthrax, but not inconceivable.
However, the amount he would have had to process was larger than needed for his animal experiments. Each letter is thought to have contained 2-3 trillion spores. I can t recall his animals receiving more than about a million spores each. So roughly one million times as much anthrax was needed for the letters as for an animal experiment. Increasing the scale of fermentation should have been noticed. Drying anthrax would have been noticed, as there was no need to prepare any other anthrax specimens this way. Sudden use of a dryer for large samples would be suspicious. Post-drying processing for the letter anthrax likely took place; were the materials needed available to Ivins?

At the same time, I don’t think Ivin’s suicide is anything but a suicide. No conspiracy theory needed there. If the FBI had been hounding me for an extended period, telling my children I was mass murderer, and ready to indict me for murder, I’d be driven to despair and feeling pretty suicidal. What would you do?
I also don’t think there’s some Government conspiracy. The FBI agents in the investigation have just spent more money then any other investigation. Want to bet they are under a lot of pressure to conclude it? Have you ever been involved in a company’s most expensive project ever and there’s no sign of it being completed? Ever feel like cutting a few corners? Ever want to just get it over with?
Glenn Greenwald/a has a series of articles talking about it.
This is definitely a topic that deserves the best of your critical reading skills. You shouldn’t draw a conclusion (either way, including that he’s innocent) until long after all this evidence is reviewed.

News

Aspirin: Just do it

I’ve been having an ongoing discussion about taking aspirin to help reduce
coronary disease problems. Here’s an article saying it’s good for you:
Aspirin can cut heart risk for the healthy:

The task force said those who could benefit from aspirin use are men over the age 40, postmenopausal women, and younger people with risk factors such as smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
The new report shows regular aspirin use reduced the risk of coronary heart
disease by 28 percent in healthy people who have never had a heart attack or
stroke.

And from the American Heart Association:

Studies show aspirin also helps prevent these events from occurring
in people at high risk (primary prevention).

Fun

Louise Bourgeois

We went to the
Guggenheim
to see
Louise Bourgeois:

Louise Bourgeois is a full-career retrospective of one of the most important artists of our time. This exhibition, which will fill the entire Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda and one adjacent gallery, will be the most comprehensive examination to date of Bourgeois s long and distinguished career.
Born almost a century ago, Louise Bourgeois has remained steadfastly at the vanguard of the development of contemporary art for more than 70 years, and continues to create new bodies of work with characteristic energy and restless innovation. Throughout a career that has intersected with many of the leading avant-garde movements of the 20th century, including Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Post-Minimalism, she has remained resolutely committed to a singular creative vision.

Sadly, I think I’m just not a sculpture person. I’m like 0 for 5 in sculpture exhibits.
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The Guggenheim is also starting to open up some side galleries. We saw a Kadinsky room. Here’s “Blue Mountain” from 1908.
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Politics

Diagramming actors in Bush Administration’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors”

Slate has a very cool interactive Venn diagram showing which major administrative figures are involved in each scandal:

Each scandal is represented by a colored circle that encompasses the people who are implicated. As it’s easy to see, many of the players here are mixed up in two, three, or more of the alleged crimes. Hence all the overlapping circles (Venn-diagram heaven!).”

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Technology

Useful jQuery

Collecting some useful jQuery I might be able to use:

  • Gradient background
  • Interactive stars
  • idTabs hides the content for each tab in a “div”
  • Cluetip provides tooltips with an ajax interface to fetch them dynamically or as made up from content on the page. Tips are html.
    • Columnizer dynamicaly adjusts multi columns to fit the current browser width. Not sure how I can take advantage of it but for more text base sites it sounds great. Maybe that resume plug in I’ve been contemplating
    • Checkbox for some pretty checkboxes like:
      Firefox002.png
  • Lavalamp has feedback as you move from one element to the next. Might be good for tabs, etc
    • Flexigrid offers sortable, pageable, ajax tables:

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  • Readable tables offers row, header, column highlighting. No demo to try it out, though
  • Timeago offers dynamically updated timestamps in a human readable format. Eg. “You opened this page 3 minutes ago.”
Technology

Some javascript

flot generates some pretty nice looking plots all done on the client side:

Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side.
The focus is on simple usage (all settings are optional), attractive looks and interactive features like zooming. ”

Firefox001.png

Fun · Technology

Today in music

Thanks to my son misplacing an adaptor for my earphones to work with my iPhone I had to turn to internet radio for background noise to block out the office chatter. Well, at least it’s giving me something new on my playlist. Trying out 100hitz and the Alternative channel

  • Just listened to Lucinda Williams’s “Righteously”. A bit bluesy, a bit country, a bit rock.
  • How about Korn’s “Freak on a Leash” (MTV unplugged). I’m not normally a Korn person.
News · Politics

Housing going down for a while

I swear I’m not a pessimist but this economy really has me worried. The fundamentals really do point to disaster! My next fear is that inflation is going to be seized on as the solution to our current crisis.
Housing prices haven’t hit bottom yet

“I don’t think we get strengthening in the housing market until late 2011 or
2012,” said Mark Vitner, senior economist for Wachovia, the nation’s fourth
largest bank and one that this month hired the number-two man from the Treasury
Department as its new chief executive officer to shore up its own growing
exposure to mortgage debt.
Before bottoming out, prices nationwide should fall 22 percent to 29 percent on
average from their peak, according to a report that Wachovia released last
Monday.