Did Google Earth find Atlantis?

Sadly no.

“It’s true that many amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth, including a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species and the remains of an ancient Roman villa,” a statement from Google read. “In this case, however, what users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data.”

A matter of timing

John McPhee had a nice piece about fact-checking in a recent issue of the New Yorker which included this anecdote:

The worst checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. In the words of Josh Hersh, “It really annoys them”. Sara [a retired New Yorker fact-checker] remembers a reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was the “late reader” in the nursing home. He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker, in its next issue, of course complied, inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed.

John McPhee, “Checkpoints”, New Yorker, Feb 9&16, 2009.

Later: Julian Barnes (who wrote the magazine’s ‘Letter from London’ for years) had a nice essay about the New Yorker’s fact-checkers in one of his books. Now where did I put it?

On this day…

… in 1929, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone’s gang were gunned down.

Footnote: Capone was eventually convicted not for his heinous crimes but for tax evasion. Could there be a precedent here for dealing with corrupt bankers?

Why Microsoft Word is great for journalism

Remember those $15 billion valuations of faceBook at the time that Microsoft invested in the company?

Well, here’s a lovely story from Good Morning Silicon Valley

For a company built on the public’s willingness to share ordinarily private information, Facebook itself has been notably tight-lipped on some subjects. The company’s market value? Just let people extrapolate from the 2007 Microsoft investment ($240 million for a 1.6 percent stake equals $15 billion). The price of getting founder Mark Zuckerberg’s former college buddies to stop complaining that he stole their idea? Seal the settlement in closed court and swear all parties to a blood oath of silence. But information wants to be free, and when the only thing standing in its way is a thin film of virtual marker ink, somebody’s going to help it make a break.

See, the problem with using virtual marker ink to black out text in a digital document is that it works only for the printed output. On the original, the text is still there behind the shading, and if you copy and paste it into a new document, you can peel away the veil with no problem. That’s why you wouldn’t want to do this with, say, a sensitive legal document full of redactions. Unfortunately for Facebook, however, the transcript of that settlement hearing was edited in just this fashion, and when the Associated Press was given a digital copy and performed the magic cut-and-paste trick, a much more modest valuation of the company was revealed.

A much more modest valuation. See GMSV for the details.

Tip: never send anybody a .doc. Convert it to text or pdf first. But then you knew that, didn’t you?

After the snows

One of the most noticeable side-effects of the icy weather is the rapid deterioration of road surfaces everywhere. Wonder how long it will take to repair the damage.

The Most Dangerous Man in the World

From Mark Anderson.

Now that we no longer have a chimpanzee in the cockpit of the F-16, some folks may be wondering, just who is the most dangerous man in the world?

The answer, I think, is simple: A. Q. Khan, “founder” (or perhaps chief thief) in charge of Pakistan’s first nuclear program, and, more importantly, of his own secret nuclear proliferation ring.

Dr. Khan, just released from house arrest this week, is now wandering around, free, no doubt wondering how to resurrect the absolute worst idea in the entire world today. Specifically: Goodness, how can I make sure that as many fundamentalist Islamic states (and, hey, crackballs like North Korea, too) as possible acquire nuclear weapons, as quickly as possible?

I suppose if one had to define insanity, Khan would be the walking definition.

One can hope that the real reason he was let out of the box was so that the FBI and CIA could track his every movement and unearth the rest of his still-extant client list. Or, even better, that he has been taken off the house arrest regime in hopes that he goes camping, and the tiger enters his tent and eats him, before Khan can destroy the Earth.

I never liked the idea that he only received house arrest. It was a bit like taking a Hitler wannabe and putting him on free-roaming probation in a Nordic country with blue-eyed teens.

Is there a worse crime against humanity than shipping nuclear weapons technology and knowhow to unstable regimes of indiscriminate pedigree and no obvious systems or sense of restraint? You might think there are today, but you would certainly not say it tomorrow, if Khan’s bombs had been used meanwhile.

This jerk belongs in jail, not in house arrest. Think of him like Napoleon, without the good parts…