Wow factor.

Boy, how times have changed.  My son has a book report due this week.  No sense in waiting until the last minute to start.  Well, the book fell apart as he read it, and ended up in separate places.  When he finally buckled down to work today, he couldn't find it.  If that was me, I would have spent days looking for the book.  Instead, I taught him to use Google Books.  Putting in the name of the book (Harry Houdini) and scrolling until I recognized the cover in the images, we tracked down a digital copy of his book.  Truly, if it had been me, twenty-six years ago, I would just not have done the work if I couldn't find the book.  What a different world we live in today, and that my children will grow up in.  My son came home with outline maps of states.  I taught him to use Google Images to figure out the state, and then google "state facts" for the information the worksheet requires.  When I was a kid, we had Funk and Wagnall's encyclopedia.  I remember seeing them on sale in the super market.  Now, more knowledge than that is available to my students on their phone.  My children will grow up in a world that I can not currently envision.  My four year old is watching movies at will on my tablet.  My son is competing in a Lego's Robotics League.  I don't recognize this world.  Simply amazing.  Whatever I want to learn, I google. 

A small dissection of the Marine Corps urination scandal

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By Lockerz

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/12/panetta-orders-probe-video-showing-marines-urinating-on-dead-taliban/

I was in no big hurry to follow up on this story, but I felt that I must deal with it at some point. This post is not to pass judgement but to look at a few issues.

1.  In the article, Fox News uses the word desecration in parentheses ("desecrating" the bodies).  From a sociological perspective, if these were American dead, and anyone was urinating on them, would we hesitate to call it a desecration? 

2.  Bad things happen in war.  Morals are not instilled in war time.  They are very often shed.  These men should be judged by a jury of peers, not the media or the public.  Unfortunately, their actions will be viewed by many, and it is not our mainstream media that will be the problem.  We can not filter what others find on the internet (where this video posted), and how it is used against us.  My fear is for future U.S. military personnel in the wake of this incident.  There are numerous examples of group actions that are not reflective of mainstream cultural norms in American history. This is not a new phenomenon, but as the author of the essay points out, "It shows how, in the present era of instant communication and YouTube, a tactical judgment blunder by a small number of troops can become a big strategic problem in a matter of a few hours."  An isolated incident is no longer an isolated incident. 

3.  The concept of the other plays perfectly here.  It would have been much more difficult to have done this to someone that resemble the Marines.  Because of the differences in language, diet and smell, culture, and appearance, this behavior was more acceptable.  The Japanese skull on the desk of the young girl writing her boyfriend in the Pacific. . .

4.  The justification is that these men had suffered losses at the hands of an enemy that did not fight fairly.  The same logic is used to defend the American soldiers at My Lai, under Lt. Calley.  Ultimately, if we seek to do terrible things, we will find a way to justify them, also. 

5.  God be with the soldiers and their families, especially.  Their careers are probably over.  And, God be with our enemies.  Some day we will all understand this war and find some type of peace. 

Air Force playing games on PS3

U.S. Air Force building supercomputer from PS3s
by Mike Smith
yahoo_games_p893:http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/u-s-air-force-building-supercomputer-from-ps3s/1387199
Buzz up!

Image Courtesy of the USAF
No doubt the Air Force purchasing department gets some odd requests from time to time, but we'd love to have seen the grin on the face of the officer tasked with procuring some 1,700 Playstation 3s for a USAF facility in Rome, NY.
Before you complain about your tax dollars being spent on toys, the machines aren't for gaming. Instead, the facility -- an Air Force research lab -- will join them into a parallel-computing cluster that, when complete, will number well over 2,000 PS3s.
The supercomputer -- snappily monikered "500 TeraFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster" -- will be put to work playing 2,000 simultaneous games of God of War III. Wait, no. Among other things, they'll be attempting to simulate the way the human brain processes information and how it pulls off the remarkably difficult task of recognizing the content of images.
"Humans can routinely do these things, but a computer struggles to do it," the facility's computing director Mark Barnell told Stars and Stripes. "In a general sense, we are interested in making it autonomous."
The cluster won't be as powerful as a regular supercomputing rig, but it will be cheaper and more environmentally friendly: it'll consume as much as 95% less electrical power and shut down unused machines when the cluster isn't running at full capacity.


(I just found this incredibly interesting, and terrifying. I am a tech phobe when it comes to computers imitating human behavior. Keep my calendar, yes. Interact socially with me, no. And now the Air Force is trying to delve into smarter computers. Grr.)