The Dump Cheney Rumor

Anyone reading Drudge today will notice that there is a report that Bush will dump Cheney
following the 2006 elections. Those people taking this report at face
value would do well to remember what Bush's father, George H.W. Bush,
did in 1992 with his own Vice President, Dan Quayle.


Like Cheney, Quayle had a few liabilities with the press corps (Murphy Brown, e.g.), and his
Chief of Staff, William Kristol, was determined to prop his boss up,
like any good CoS. Thus, Kristol leaked a story that Bush would replace
Quayle. The press corps forced Bush to issue a denial, solidifying
Quayle's number two spot on the GOP ticket.




Dumping Cheney after the elections won't make any difference for this
year's results, which is what Republicans worry most about.  Next
year is Bush's last term in office, and installing a new Vice President
isn't that easy when you consider the vetting process and the Harriet
Myers withdrawal.



Historical moments in Dick Cheney's life: His opinion of Adam Clymer.

Nature Magazine: Google Earth Starts a Revolution

As you can see from my previous entries, my latest
timekiller is Google Earth. When I was
little, I used to look up places in a dusty oversized Atlas. Now I just use
Google Maps or Google Earth. This week Nature Magazine’s
Declan Butler (subscription required) describes how actual scientists are using
Google Earth to plot their datasets.  I
didn’t know scientists were using it, but I did know that some pilots had used
it to plot the routes of a couple of downed aircraft recently. Using FlightAware, you can
convert text tracks into Google-Earth-compatible XML files
(Courtesy Tom Armour) and see where the airplane was going.

While GE doesn’t have the analytic functions of ESRI’s ArcGIS, which
GIS people use to do all kinds of things, like improving farming production and
predicting wildfire paths, GE brings some level of GIS to everyone in a cheap,
easy-to-use manner. ESRI is releasing a major upgrade to ArcGIS this year and
is releasing its own free visualization tool, ArcGIS Explorer.  GE is making waves in the GIS world now and
will change things in the political world soon. Declan sums up the power of easy GIS: 

One of the traditional roles of GIS has been
to provide data to support decision-making. And environmental groups that have
discovered GIS are starting to use it to change the balance of power in public
debates. As more citizens become concerned about their local environment,
easy-to-use virtual globes will facilitate the communication of spatial
information between stakeholders and government agencies.

Al Gore backed a Digital Earth plan back in 1998, but the
project was killed in 2001. Seeing how the “Information Superhighway” changed
the Internet from a sleepy Cold-War government project into a high-capacity
commerce engine probably gave him an idea of what could happen with ubiquitous
GIS. 

When you can see everything, there’s no place left to hide.

Random footnote: When you register
for Google Earth Plus for $20, Google takes you to
registration.keyhole.com. Keyhole was the NRO's codeword for the
KH-series of spy satellites, one of the first significant uses of Bell
Lab's CCD devices,
which just won an award. Nobody mentioned that CCDs are another benefit
of  super-secret Cold War technology. Further reading: Spying With Maps.

HDTV Page Updated

I just checked the logs for my site, and while more people
continue to look at this blog, more are looking for HDTV information in
Washington, DC. I think a lot of people are trying to figure out why
they're not seeing the Olympics in HD on their new HD sets. Thus I have updated the page.

The Google Maps (Formerly) Secret Places Tour

The first time I fired up Google Earth, I did the same thing that I did when I first tried TerraServer: find as many “secret” places that I could. The first thing I noticed with Google Earth was that the roof of the White House had been painted out, as well as the rooftops of the Department of the Treasury and the Eisenhower Office Building (OEOB), both next door to the White House. Since then, they have become “uncensored” and you can see that there’s really nothing to see there, anyway. At least there’s nothing that you can’t see from the top of the Washington Monument, which is open to tourists with cameras. That Google had censored the White House rooftop, one of the lower rooftops in the area, was curious, so I went on to look at what else was or wasn’t “censored.” I could view the CIA and NSA just fine, with nothing photoshopped out.

Having traveled to China, the land ‘o oppressive communism, I am used to having photography be prohibited, but I’m a little uncomfortable with being told not to take pictures in public places in the United States. This happened to me once at a U.S.
airport when I took pictures of a dog running loose on the runway. Security was more interested in stopping me from photographing the sensitive area than making the runway safe for aircraft.

Thus the “secret” tour. Not that these places area really secret any more, but it’s neat to see what Google is and is not afraid of publishing. Remember, the Russians already have high resolution imagery of all this stuff. Lest you think I’m making us all more vulnerable to terrorists, there are locations that will remain undisclosed.

You might as well see the buildings for which your tax dollars are paying.

The White House

The Pentagon

The CIA (There’s almost nothing secret about it anymore.)

The NSA at Fort Meade in Maryland.
The NSA was established by the National Security Act of 1947 at the same time as the CIA, but wasn’t publicly disclosed until 1974. Imagine the press conference that day.

National Reconnaissance Office. I got their address from their spiffy web site, and was especially impressed with their kids website. Exactly why the NRO needs to spend my tax dollars on a kids site is beyond me. If you fly into Dulles Airport (IAD) on runway 1L or 1R, you'll fly right over the NRO.

Department of Homeland Security.
This is one of their locations, known officially as the Naval District of Washington Nebraska Avenue Complex, formerly known as Naval Telecommunications and Computer Security Command. Originally, the location was Mt. Vernon College, President Roosevelt gave it to the Navy during World Ward Two with the promise to the College that they could have it back after the war is over. I wonder if Bush told the Navy it could have its complex back after the War on Terrorism.

Mystery Location, Northwest Washington D.C. I have lived in DC almost my whole life, and I have always wondered what the heck this thing is. It's just a mound surrounded by a fence with Federal Government "Stay the Heck Out or We're Allowed to Shoot" signs. I wonder if the people who live in the houses next to it know. If anyone knows what this is, let me know.

Andrews Air Force Base. This is where Air Force One is based.

Ronald Reagan National Airport. Remember, if you hang out there taking pictures less detailed, you’ll get arrested. Our enemies might figure out that airplanes land and take off from this strategic location.

Camp David – not that you can actually see anything.

Camp Peary (Summer Camp for CIA folks. This used to be as secret as the CIA)

The Naval Observatory. (Official Residence of the Vice President, and censored by Google. You can tell they were trying to be subtle by pixelating out the detail, but it’s still obvious. Why is this more “secret” than the White House?)

Dick Cheney’s retreat on the Eastern Shore (Not too detailed at all.)

Sugar Grove, WV, Echelon Antenna Station. If you have to know what Echelon is there are obsessed people watching the watchers who will tell you. It’s well-known enough now to have a Wikipedia entry.

Area 51.
(Only parts of this picture have been censored. See if you can spot the photoshopped areas.) Area 51 isn’t even secret anymore, and development of new aircraft has moved to other, undisclosed locations. Area 51’s budget still remains secret enough that Congress can’t cut it. The airport code for Area 51 is (K)XTA. Runway lengths are as follows: Runway 12-30  5420' x 120' concrete Runway 14-32  12000' x 200' concrete. According to the Jeppesen-Sanderson
Aviation Database, there is no fee for landing there. However, it is underneath restricted airspace with an "unknown" controlling agency.

Mount Weather. (Apocalyptic continuity-of-command center and FEMA center.)

The Greenbriar, West Virginia (Former Congressional apocalypse shelter.) Like Mt. Weather, this was exposed by the Washington Post. The only good thing about an apocalypse, though, is that we might lose Congress.

Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Not secret – this is where the Air Force dismantles B-52s and displays them for Russian satellite verification.

Russian Embassy Compound. From this commanding location, they can see quite a bit of Washington and pick up just about every radio signal in town. If I had antennas there and a reasonable budget for receivers, spectrum analyzers, decoding hardware and software, computers and some smart programmers, you would be shocked at the intercepts I could produce.

Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. The media isn't allowed to shoot photos here, because then we would know too much.

Northfield, Minnesota.
I know about this only because I went to school here, and it's not that secret. However, it is the Civil Defense evacuation center for Minneapolis -- St. Paul. Two of the dorms were federally funded and have tile walls inside. (Tile walls = easy to clean = field hospital.) The inter-building tunnels on Campus, since closed, housed stockpiles of food and water. I'm sure there were other cities with designated evacuation centers, but I have no idea how to find them. Do you know your designated evacuation center? I live in DC, and I have no idea where my local evacuation center is.

The Neurochemistry of Schadenfreude

Update, 09-25-2009: A postdoc has proven that dead salmon could apparently detect, and respond to, the the emotional state of human beings, according to his fMRI research. That's better than the fish sticks joke.

After reading Slashdot's latest on
lie-detection using an MRI (Magnetic
Resonance Imagery), I read a submission to Nature on "Empathic
neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others," which
also used MRI to detect emotional states of its subjects. (The title is from
the cover of Nature's 26/01/06 issue.)  Basically,
a team from CalTech,
the Wellcome Department of Imaging,
Neuroscience, and the Institute
of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College of London, used the
Prisoner's Dilemma game to induce liking and disliking of opponent players. Emotional
reactions could be located in specific regions of the brain. 

Being able to "see" emotions in the brain sounds pretty
cool, but these emotions have been known to be "real" since Homer told the
story of Apollo helping Paris
kill Achilles. The new technology for lie detection sounds like it could be
used for great profit, but how would you feel being asked for a "lifestyle MRI?"
The lifestyle polygraph is rather feared because the more conscientious you
are, the more likely it is to trip you up. (Remember that pen you "stole" by
failing to return it?) However, the polygraph is inaccurate and hasn't caught
any spies yet. (They'll say it helped, but it didn't stop Aldrich Ames or
Robert Hansen.)

Who will administer the lie-detection MRI? It's not like you
can go get a six-week degree in radiology and neurology, as you can for the polygraph. It takes a board-certified
radiologist
just to find something actually wrong with you in an MRI, not
just a subtle change in a specific area during the subject's response.
I doubt
highly that if any companies start setting this up that they'll even
use
scientific staff to run it. I doubt that many doctors would even
testify to its
reliability, but that won't stop it from being used for profit.
Fortunately, the courts have refused to admit polygraphs as evidence
and will do the same for MRI lie detection.

Circumnavigating the ADIZ

On Thursday morning, I checked the weather and headed out to Montgomery County Airpark. I had planned on encircling the Washington-Baltimore area Air Defense Identification Zone, taking the long way south of the Patuxent Restricted Areas, of which there are many.

The flight was uneventful, with the exception of a couple of F-16s heading north at my altitude just NE of Salisbury-Wicomico Municipal Airport. They were just close enough for me to be able to identify them.

Total air time was just about 4.4 hours, with fuel stops at Georgetown, Delaware, (KGED) and Frederick, Maryland (KFDK), where I had to stop and file to come back in to KGAI. I got 13 gallons at GED and 25 gallons at FDK.

The chart below shows my course in dark blue and my planned route in light blue. As you can see, I took shortcuts wherever I could do so and avoid restricted airspace.