Weekend Links

• Maryland Voters Test New Cryptographic Voting System – Hmm... Interesting....
• Texas snatches voter system from $863m IBM contract
• Xoie Claims $1 Million Lunar Lander Prize
• 'Space elevator' wins $900,000 NASA prize
• NASA juggles manifest for future Ares test flights
• Video: Aerial View of Ares I-X Flight Test
• Aerial video provides view of Ares 1-X parachute trouble
• Hubble’s New Camera Delivers Another Stunner
• Orbiter camera sees ice-covered Phoenix lander
• Mars rover plans its escape – Spirit not a weather station, yet.
• Ground teams struggle to save Mars orbiter from itself
• Strange Brew at LCROSS's Crash Site
• LRO Image of Apollo 17 Landing Site
• Signature of Antimatter Detected in Lightning
• Ionic batteries could multiply battery life by 11
• How to Keep Planes From Colliding With Lasers
• Nov. 3, 1993: Theremin Fades Out
• Generation specs: Stopping the short-sight epidemic
• Does Vitamin D Improve Brain Function?
• Oldest American artefact unearthed
• Darwin’s Wolf Mystery Solved
• Was life founded on cyanide from space crashes?
• Frozen Antarctic lakes yield new viruses
• Giant crack in Africa formed in just days
• Civil War In Corporate America: Banks Battling The Chamber On Accounting Rules
• Copyright Treaty Is Policy Laundering at Its Finest
• The ACTA Internet provisions: DMCA goes worldwide

Weekend Links

• In Industry First, Voting Machine Company to Publish Source Code – Even if the source code was absolutely complete—representing every element of logic in every piece of hardware in the entire voting system (which isn't going to happen)—and absolutely correct, and absolutely uncorruptible, how would voters, or election officials, know that it was that software running in the machines they vote with? This is a nice gesture, but, ultimately, a meaningless one.
• House, Senate get separate bills to kill net neutrality
• Intel touts NAND-killer breakthrough
• Little, big, and green: a biography of the solid-state disk
• Slim, warm superconductors promise faster electronics
• Quantum gravity theories wiped out by a gamma ray burst
• Baffling Patterns Form in Scientific Sandbox
• Silence! The Last of the Giant Radio Telescopes Is Listening to the Universe
• 3,000 Images Combine for Stunning Milky Way Portrait – It won't really be stunning until we get a much higher-resolution look at it, but it sounds like a great piece of work.
• Huge Explosion Was Biggest Space Rock to Strike Earth Since 1994
• Taking Earth’s Temperature With 30-Mile Thermometer
• NASA assessing parachutes and dented Ares 1-X booster
• Parachute failure causes damage to Ares 1-X booster
• Pad 39B suffers substantial damage from Ares I-X launch – Parachute update
• Asteroid blast reveals holes in Earth's defences
• Little X-Plane Pushes Bottom Edge of the Envelope
• Army’s Robot-Man Walks Like the Real Thing
• Animal Robots: Marine Machines Made in Nature's Image
• Magnetic 'eyesight' helps birds find their way
• A Short History of Vaccine Panic
• The secret history of swine flu
• US swine flu vaccine too late to beat autumn wave
• Swine flu: Eight myths that could endanger your life
• Autoimmune disease cells harnessed to fight cancer
• US FDA says omega-3 oils from GM soya are safe to eat
• Inside a Cellphone Radiation Testing Lab
• Where do ghosts come from?
• Don’t Tell Geico: You May Be a Natural Born Bad Driver
• Clever 'chopped' cars promise cheap electric commuting – Of course, they'll still sit in the same traffic jams as conventional vehicles.
• Probably guilty: Bad mathematics means rough justice
• Daylight Savings Time 2009: When and Why We Fall Back

Weekend Links

• An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All – Thanks to Jay Lake.
• H1N1: Yes, You Should Vaccinate Your Kids
• Is the swine flu vaccine safe?
• Six diseases you never knew you could catch
• Antidepressants and depression may both harm a fetus
• Stop giving antipsychotics to people with dementia
• Light All Night Not Alright
• Woman's Rape Called “Pre-Existing Condition” by Insurance Companies
• Human Spaceflight Ball in Obama’s Court
• NASA iPhone Application
• Apollo-Era Crawler Carries Test Rocket to Launch Pad – Well, of course, but the crawlers deserve whatever publicity they can get.
• Risk and ingenuity cross paths on Ares 1-X test flight
• Static electricity rule threatens on-time liftoff
• Augustine panel submits final report on spaceflight options
• Bolden Directs MSFC Special Team to evaluate HLV alternatives
• Fudged titanium could threaten next Mars rover – "Everybody thought we were buying a (military) standard titanium that was properly treated for use. It turns out it wasn't worked properly."
• Astronomers find organic molecules around gas planet
• Found: first 'skylight' on the moon – The caverns of the moon.
• $500,000 treasure dug up in lunar soil – NASA's "Regolith Excavation Challenge" has a winner.
• Laser microscope aims to uncover alien life
• Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock?
• Modeling a black hole with a 300 GigaWatt laser
• Huge CCD Could Give Real-Time View of Dark Energy Hunt
• LHC reaches operational temps, collisions start in 5 weeks
• World’s Biggest Digital Brains Think in Teraflops, Model the Universe
• Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint?
• Seven questions that keep physicists up at night
• Fatal frog fungal disease figured out
• How City Noise Is Reshaping Birdsong
• The year's best wildlife photos – Wonderful wolf photo.
• Shoot new angles with kite photography
• How much are coral ecosystems worth? Try $172 billion--A year
• Counting the hidden ($120 billion) cost of US energy economy
• Does Economics Violate the Laws of Physics?
• Stealthy wind turbines aim to disappear from radar screens
• Hurricane Forcing: Can Tropical Cyclones Be Stopped?
• House Considers Limiting Patriot Act Spy Powers – Thank you, John.
• Judge Refuses to Lift 5-Year-Old Patriot Act Gag Order
• Editing Scientists: Science and Policy at the White House
• Sequoia e-voting code reveals possible FEC rule violations – And if no problems had been detected in the Sequoia code, how would anyone know that the clean code (and no other code) was actually executing in the voting machines, and their support infrastructure? If election integrity matters – if democracy matters – electronic voting machines must go.
• Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released – No matter how well-intentioned and executed, open-sourcing software—and I say this an author of open-source projects—does not have the magic power to turn bad ideas into good ones. Electronic voting is, and will remain, a bad idea.
• California Investigating Problems With Voting-Machine Audit Logs
• Apple shuts down ZFS open source project – If the author is correct that Apple is abandoning ZFS, that's a bad move on Apple's part. Forget ZFS' ability to pool disk drives, or take snapshots, or its many other great features – the fact that it did error detection and correction to prevent files from being corrupted was something everyone would have benefited from, just as those of us with Mac Pros benefit from error correcting memory. These errors do happen, but most systems can't even detect them, let alone correct them, so they don't receive the attention they deserve. Dear Apple: Do better than this, you're long overdue.
• Time Warner Cable Exposes 65,000 Customer Routers to Remote Hacks
• Super-Sized Memory Could Fit Into Tiny Chips – A 1 terabyte RAM chip, potentially.
• Super Concrete in the U.S. Military, Iran … and the Pyramids?
• Can Google Earth save an indigenous tribe with maps?

Wow

Barack Obama will be President of the United States of America. An eight year nightmare is ending, and what an ending. It'll take a while to fully sink in for me.... We have a staggering mess to cleanup, but now the process can begin. At long last. Wow.

---

And just to anticipate a question: No, I don't trust electronic voting machines one iota more now than I did before the candidate I supported won, and neither should you.

Primary Voting

I voted in the Texas primaries yesterday evening, using the early voting location in the lobby of the Flawn Academic Center (or whatever we're calling that building these days), on the U.T. Austin campus. I arrived at 6 PM, but didn't get to vote until 6:30 PM, due to a line of people about 150 feet long. I've seen voting lines there before, but this was the first time I've encountered one that long. Impressive turnout.

It's just a shame that none of us voters has any way of knowing that our votes will be recorded, reported and tallied correctly, because, as has been the case for a number of years, we had no choice but to use an electronic voting system. The foundation of our democratic republic has been entrusted to devices (computers) whose defining purpose is the manipulation of data. My mind still boggles at this.

Just in case anyone wants the opinion of someone who has been programming computers for about 30 years, this is idiocy. There is no way to make pure electronic voting (which is what we use here) secure, or even accountable. And as a member of the open source software development community, let me add that electronic voting based on open source software won't help, no matter how popular that idea may be in some quarters. You can review the source code 'till the cows come home, and there still won't be any way for a voter, or an election official, to know that the code running in any given piece of e-voting equipment was produced from the meticulously reviewed and validated source code. And even if that problem magically went away, there'd be no way of knowing that there was no other code (from software to firmware to logic wired into the hardware) involved in the process of recording, reporting and tallying the votes. So, pure electronic voting should never have happened, and open-sourcing and/or reviewing the underlying code, though a good idea, cannot make it trustworthy.

It must be said that the problems cited above are not limited to the pure electronic voting systems currently in use. The system of electronically counted paper ballots that it replaced had most of the same problems - just pushed back one layer. But that one layer - the recording of the votes - was important. It made hand recounts, and other forms of validation, possible. By its very nature, pure electronic voting—to state the obvious—makes recounts, and all other forms of validation, either impossible or meaningless. That any portion of the democratic functions of our nation has come to "rely" on such systems is indicative of profound negligence, or worse. Both, I suspect.

Was vote tampering impossible in the absence of pure electronic voting systems? Certainly not. Vote tampering is a potential problem in any voting system. We all know that from the many cases of tampering that have been documented over the years. But that's actually the good news: Vote tampering could be, and was, caught before the advent of pure electronic voting systems. With the arrival of such systems, we can do little more than infer the act of tampering (and recounts have been rendered impossible). The advocates of these systems would have us believe that the resultant ignorance of tampering is equivalent to the absence of tampering. And that is indicative of profound ignorance, or worse. Both, I suspect.