I’ve been more than a little frustrated with the media coverage of the debate over Iraq strategy.  It is little more than a declaration "you don’t have a strategy" followed by "do too!"  Where is the strategy?  Where is the substance?  This kind of insubstantial coverage helped lead us into the war in the first place, on the unsound basis of WMD.

Now at last the White House has released a document outlining their strategy.  And you might be able to dig it up, though none of the news reports I read provided a link to the strategy itself, or discussed it’s contents in any meaningful way.  The document is the "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq."  If you read it, instead of the lame media coverage, you can start to have a real debate.

I for one find some things to be concerned about in the document, such as this excerpt:

Prevailing in Iraq will help us win the war on terror.

• The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. And we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror.
  • Osama Bin Laden has declared that the "third world war…is raging" in Iraq, and it will end there, in "either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation."
  • Bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri has declared Iraq to be "the place for the greatest battle," where he hopes to "expel the Americans" and then spread "the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq."
  • Al Qaida in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has openly declared that "we fight today in Iraq, and tomorrow in the Land of the Two Holy Places, and after there the west."
    • As the terrorists themselves recognize, the outcome in Iraq — success or failure — is critical to the outcome in the broader war on terrorism.

Skipping over some of the dumbest parts ("war against humanity" - give me a break!), it is pretty clear, and even the Bush administration seems to admit it, that the invasion has created a haven of sorts for terrorists.  But even more, it’s given the terrorists a global boost in popularity by associating them with freedom fighters defending the homeland.  The issue we should be talking about is whether the war (I still hate to dignify it as such) on terror is being won.  IMO the invasion has tipped the balance in favor of terrorism rather than the reverse.  This, the real Bush legacy, should be covered more fully by the media.

Wet, foggy, and generally miserable weather here today.

However, since nasty weather is such a rare occurrence, the change in the colors of the landscape is intriguing to me.  Thus a small set of Misty Roads shots.

Also, as I’m thinking more on "vision" lately (both physical and the "where am I going" type), I found some metaphorical interst in empty roads winding off into the mist.

Update 11/30: Added even more misty road photos.

Both Futo-maki and Ebi Travel Bugs have started their homeward journeys. Futo-maki (orange) has only moved about 22 miles, but into Tokyo and close to the Narita airport. Ebi (yellow) has moved 245 miles-directly away from California! I guess it’s still too close to call!

Earlier I loaded (with a lot of manual work) the movements of the Hufi Travel Bug into Google Earth to view them. Now there’s a "View in Google Earth" link which gets the raw data into KML format - though the formatting has lots to be desired. Some improvements I’d like to see:

1. Name each step the name of the cache, instead of the unfriendly code of the cache.
2. Don’t do two points for each cache (drop-off, pick-up), instead merge the log messages into a single point. It’s especially disconcerting since one of the points is at a (random?) offset from the other so they don’t visually overlap - but tweaking nice clean coordinates in this fashion isn’t likely to be viewed very positively by geocachers (who by definition value precision measurements).

I like turkey and all, but I also like cooking something a little more challenging. For several years now I’ve cooked an ethnic feast the day after Thanksgiving. It’s usually Indian, as it was again this year - I can’t resist dabbling in the alchemy of spices. I rationalize it as a tribute to the land Columbus was originally seeking.  I even found a local-ish source for fresh curry leaves: India Bazar Grocery in Folsom, about a half hour away.

Here’s the menu I prepared:

• Prawns with pomegranates: Prawns marinated in tomato paste, ground dried pomegranate seeds and other spices, and baked in foil packages with onion, cilantro, and fresh pomegranate seeds.
• Ooroomas Badun: A Sri-Lankan disk of pork chunks simmered in rich dark spices, curry leaves, and coconut milk.  Awesome!
• Saag Maas: Spinach with lamb chunks.  I added turnips (Charmaine Solomon’s Saag trick) to the recipe this year for the best results ever.
• Bhindi Masala: Okra and jalapenos in a dark, rather dry spicy sauce.
• Spicy Eggplant: Wedges of eggplant in a tomato-based sauce, prepared in the style of pickles but even tastier fresh.
• Dosas: Rice and dal crepes, filled with Potato Masala or chutneys, (or any of the other dishes, actually).
• Potato Masala: Mild potatoes in an onion, tamarind, and tumeric sauce. Actually I find Charmaine Solomon’s Gujharti Potatoes better - more tamarind plus some grated coconut give it a more interesting flavor.
• Naan Bread

Most of these recipes were from The Food of India, though the Ooroomas Badun was from Charmaine Solomon’s Complete Asian Cookbook.  Those two resources are certainly something to be grateful for!

If you like abstract colorfield paintings, here’s a set of photo collages you won’t want to miss:  50 people see… - a photoset on Flickr. Reminds me of Monet’s haystacks for some reason…

Update 11/21: Paul got his hands on the averaging script, and is doing some fun work with it. See his new Averages set. I’m even represented.

Today I joined some friends in floating in my kayak down the lower part of the American River.  This part of the river, though surrounded by residential development, turns in broad meanders.  At some bends bluffs rise up to about sixty feet. Willows, pampas grass with their flags, cottonwoods turning yellow, wild grape climbing in their branches with shades of deep orange and red, even a few palm trees, mix in with the predominant oaks on the banks.

The river is currently awash with migrating salmon.  Up to about a meter long and tall enough that their dorsal fins and tails stick out of shallow riffles like a miniature whale, they search out gravelly patches to spawn.  We could see them gliding under us in the deeper water, some mottled with white and pink fungii which accompanies their final journey from salt to fresh water.  In shallower water, they would be startled by a kayak floating among them and zig away from towards the other boats like a demented torpedo, never hitting their target but leaving a jet trail of ripples to mark their path.  While we saw some leap completely out of the water, many seem tired enough they don’t flee.  One swam directly under my boat, and didn’t seem the least startled by my touch as I reached down and touched his back.

The salmon, especially those who have completed their mission and expired, attract flocks of birds.  There were hundreds of contented-looking seagulls crowded onto each gravel bar, and more standing watchfully in evenly-spaced sentry positions along the bank.  Turkey vultures, when not wheeling serenely overhead, seem to prefer groups of about a half-dozen, and share the gravel bars with the seagulls, though I didn’t see any bird sharing his catch as there is apparently enough for all.  At one point an osprey wheeled overhead with his catch, looking for the best place to dine without the ogling of our kayak party.

Besides these predators and scavengers, we saw flocks of what appeared to be golden-eye, a few cormorants, four large grey heron stalking calmly the grasses at the shore, scattered egrets, mallards whose iridescent head features change from a backlit dark purple on your approach, to an emerald green as you float past them into the warm afternoon sun.

The following simulated aerial shot is from Google Earth, and shows the portion of the river we traversed today, from top right to bottom left.

Update 11/21 added a photo from Randall Smith. See some of his other work here.

I’m finally getting around to uploading a set of early morning photographs of the TroubleMaker rapid on the South Fork of the American River.  We camped out there overnight back in October, and kayaked and inner-tubed down the section starting just below the rapid for a couple of miles.  The flows were unseasonably high for fall, allowing for some great shots of the whitewater.

Finished uploading a selection of my Yokohama photographs, and added them both to the Yokohama set, and to the W3C Web Services FTF Japan - 2005 pool, which includes photos from other attendees. 

It’s fun to see how different people in the same place at the same time captured quite different (though in some cases almost identical) shots.

Paul and I did a little early-morning geocaching before our W3C WS-Addressing/WSDL Joint Meeting in Yokohama.

After a bit of bushwalking in the landscaping at Rinco park on the shore of Yokohama, and dodging these huge yellow-and-blue-striped spiders, Paul spotted the cache. Not having any trinkets on hand worthy of marking the occasion, we converted a couple of plastic sushi trinkets into Travel Bugs. A Travel Bug is a small object marked by a numbered dog tag allowing its movements to be tracked on the web. Our two Travel Bugs, Great Sushi race: ebi and Great Sushi Race: futo-maki will move from cache to cache, gradually (we hope) finding their way home to our respective backyard caches. The first one home wins a sushi dinner compliments of the loser.

So, which is farther in geocaching terms? California or Berkhamsted? Often measured mileage isn’t the most reliable measure of speed. A large hop isn’t that uncommon. It seems that the crucial factor for speed may be the strength of connections between "nodes" in the web of geocaches. It may be difficult (based on the behavior of geocachers) to move from one network of nodes to another network. Weak network connections may happen anywhere, not just at the most obvious geographic boundaries (like oceans). In fact airport-to-airport connections appear to be pretty strong. For "ebi," the network edge I’m worried about is the boundary between simple accessible (drive-up) caches and ebi’s destination cache which involves a several mile hike.

Or it may be that network weakness is pretty even across the board, with cachers statistically likely to visit arbitrary caches. In that case just the latency between hops may be the limiting factor. 6 hops usually takes longer then 3 hops, irrespective of the distance of those hops. lf so, the most attractive Travel Bug might have an advantage, as more cachers will want to take it to a new home.  Or they might feel sorry for an unattractive one (I maintain that’s what has happened so far!)

In the end, I’m sure the compounded sequence of arbitrary decisions that propel a Travel Bug forward lead to an outcome that is pretty random.

Just posted a few pictures taken in Japan, mostly at night, many of which are abstract.  The Japanese urban landscape is very complex and still hard for me to understand visually, which is why many of these are either abstract or close-ups.  Enjoy!

We’re all familiar with Hiroshigi’s Great Wave, undoubtedly the most recognizable piece of Japanese art in the world, part of his "21 Views of Mt. Fuji" collection, in which the activities of the Japanese are documented, always with Mt. Fuji in the background.

I felt like I woke up in a contemporary Hiroshigi print this morning, as I woke, not to rain and grey as I expected from arriving last night (last time I was here, I never saw the sky at all), but to Mt. Fuji emerging gently from the pre-dawn light over the jumbled cityscape of Yokohama. A couple of red and white radio towers made a clean nature-only shot impossible, but somehow that fits in well with Hiroshigi too…

See the full panorama here.

Dave Winer has often criticized Microsoft, so in my mind the following quote really shows how far the industry has come since the heights of Microsoft-bashing.

Consumers and businesses were reluctant to use Passport as a sort of gatekeeper, and competitors soon developed an alternative approach to verifying online identity. …

But Passport is less of a concern now that Microsoft is no longer perceived as "the evil empire," said Dave Winer, a software developer whose work on Web standards helped build a foundation for Microsoft’s new services.

"Google is more the evil empire now," Winer said. "Microsoft represents the opportunity for a two-party system."

- The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Microsoft makes splash with big plunge into Web

I continue to be amused at how black and white these many-hued issues are presented.  And it’s still fun to see the undeserved mantle passed to another (equally undeserving) company.