A little-known bit of geek history

The first team of programmers were all women. 

Light writing

You've got to watch the video of light grafitti.

Anticipating the winter's weather

Ice Storms!

Airliner #4

A 1929 design proposal for an intercontinental airliner.  It's a bit different than those that followed.

Reproduction Time Bandits map

oooh....pretty.

A painstaking reproduction of the map of all the time portals from the Terry Gilliam movie "Time Bandits."

Re: another Sony Bravia ad coming...

Oh No!  It's another one -- this time, a pyramid is attacked by spools of string!

It made sense at the time....

...but now you've got to get that (barn full of hay, long pole, spare tractor trailer) home, and all you've got is a (donkey, bicycle, roller skates, Citroen.)  What to do?

Photo of the day

When is a sunset not a sunset?  When you're far enough north.

Artist of the day

Sarah Sze creates ephemeral, site-specific artworks by assembling thousands of small objects into complex forms.

Ah, the good old days of wartime interrogation

Covert interrogation under pressure didn't start at Guantanamo. Nazi interrogation during WWII was tough, and delivered the goods.  Sometimes, the techniques included a nice steak dinner and a game of chess.

Fort Hunt's Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII
Interrogators Fought 'Battle of Wits'

By Petula Dvorak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 6, 2007; A01

For six decades, they held their silence.

The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.

When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.

Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners' cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria. Across the river, President Bush defended his administration's methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects during an Oval Office appearance.

Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army's Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

"I feel like the military is using us to say, 'We did spooky stuff then, so it's okay to do it now,' " said Arno Mayer, 81, a professor of European history at Princeton University.

When Peter Weiss, 82, went up to receive his award, he commandeered the microphone and gave his piece.

"I am deeply honored to be here, but I want to make it clear that my presence here is not in support of the current war," said Weiss, chairman of the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy and a human rights and trademark lawyer in New York City.

The veterans of P.O. Box 1142, a top-secret installation in Fairfax County that went only by its postal code name, were brought back to Fort Hunt by park rangers who are piecing together a portrait of what happened there during the war.

Nearly 4,000 prisoners of war, most of them German scientists and submariners, were brought in for questioning for days, even weeks, before their presence was reported to the Red Cross , a process that did not comply with the Geneva Conventions. Many of the interrogators were refugees from the Third Reich.

"We did it with a certain amount of respect and justice," said John Gunther Dean, 81, who became a career Foreign Service officer and ambassador to Denmark.

The interrogators had standards that remain a source of pride and honor.

"During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone," said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. "We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity."

Exactly what went on behind the barbed-wire fences of Fort Hunt has been a mystery that has lured amateur historians and curious neighbors for decades.

During the war, nearby residents watched buses with darkened windows roar toward the fort day and night. They couldn't have imagined that groundbreaking secrets in rocketry, microwave technology and submarine tactics were being peeled apart right on the grounds that are now a popular picnic area where moonbounces mushroom every weekend.

When Vincent Santucci arrived at the National Park Service's George Washington Memorial Parkway office as chief ranger four years ago, he asked his cultural resource specialist, Brandon Bies, to do some research so they could post signs throughout the park, explaining its history and giving it a bit more dignity.

That assignment changed dramatically when ranger Dana Dierkes was leading a tour of the park one day and someone told her about a rumored Fort Hunt veteran.

It was Fred Michel, who worked in engineering in Alexandria for 65 years, never telling his neighbors that he once faced off with prisoners and pried wartime secrets from them.

Michel directed them to other vets, and they remembered others.

Bies went from being a ranger researching mountains of topics in stacks of papers to flying across the country, camera and klieg lights in tow, to document the fading memories of veterans.

He, Santucci and others have spent hours trying to sharpen the focus of gauzy memories, coaxing complex details from men who swore on their generation's honor to never speak of the work they did at P.O. Box 1142.

"The National Park Service is committed to telling your story, and now it belongs to the nation," said David Vela, superintendent of the George Washington Memorial Parkway.

There is a deadline. Each day, about 1,100 World War II veterans die, said Jean Davis, spokeswoman for the U.S. Army's Freedom Team Salute program, which recognizes veterans and the parents, spouses and employers who provide support for active-duty soldiers.

By gathering at Fort Hunt yesterday, the quiet men could be saluted for the work they did so long ago.

Photos of the day

Optical illusions and architecture

Help, Help, my quantum mechanics lectures are being used to sell printers on TV

Or, so reports poor Scott Aaronson:

Australian actresses are plagiarizing my quantum mechanics lecture to sell printers

I tried to think of a witty, ironic title for this post, but in the end, I simply couldn't. The above title is a literal statement of fact.

A reader named Warren Smith informs me of an Australian TV commercial (which you can watch on YouTube), in which two fashion models have the following conversation:

Model 1: But if quantum mechanics isn't physics in the usual sense — if it's not about matter, or energy, or waves — then what is it about?

Model 2: Well, from my perspective, it's about information, probabilities, and observables, and how they relate to each other.

Model 1: That's interesting!

The commercial then flashes the tagline "A more intelligent model," followed by a picture of a Ricoh printer.

"More intelligent," or simply more shameless? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, allow me to quote from Lecture 9 of my Quantum Computing Since Democritus notes:

But if quantum mechanics isn't physics in the usual sense — if it's not about matter, or energy, or waves, or particles — then what is it about? From my perspective, it's about information and probabilities and observables, and how they relate to each other.

For almost the first time in my life, I'm at a loss for words. I don't know how to respond. I don't know which of 500,000 possible jokes to make. Help me, readers. Should I be flattered? Should I be calling a lawyer?

In the comments, it's mentioned that the line "That's interesting!" is rather lame.  "But, that's the only bit I didn't write!" replies Scott.

I am Not a Number, I am a never-ending blog discussion.

Forty years ago, a seventeen episode summer replacement series aired on television, and there are still heated arguments as to what it was about, and even how it actually ended.