Politics Is a Continuation of War by Other Means

The following is an editorial about recent politics in Washington involving the Petraeus resignation.   In this editorial, I express my real opinion about the Republicans and if that is upsetting to you, you may wish to stop reading.   

When I started this blog, I made the conscious decision that one thing I was going to do here was to express myself honestly about some of the politics and hypocrisy I have observed in my so-called life.   This is the second such editorial in a series, the first is here.

One more time we have a situation where the Republicans demonstrate amazing hypocrisy and a willingness to damage America in any way they can as part of their pursuit of power.   In an attempt to damage a member of the the Obama Administration they have slandered and probably succeeded in destroying the career of a loyal and competent soldier.  

The situation as I understand it is this.   The FBI failed to notify Congress that they were investigating a senior administration official.  Presumably the investigation itself was initiated by right wing Republicans looking to generate dirt to manipulate the Presidential election.  The investigation failed to find any wrongdoing and the investigation was dropped.  Some right wing FBI agents decided to disclose confidential personal information collected during the investigation to their allies in the Republican party in congress, who used this information to attack and slander a person who was innocent of all wrongdoing.

Having an affair is not a crime in this country.   If it were, there would be a lot of criminals walking around.  And Republicans of all people should be the last people to point fingers.

This post has been rewritten to be a little less negative.  Are we so powerless that we can not even control our own FBI ?   Are we so stupid that Republicans can not see how evil their elected representatives are?

Maybe its just that the Republicans are desperate men.   I dont know, I am not going to worry about it here on this Blog, I have better things to do with my time.

Will Glamorous Spies Seduce Our Systems Administrators?

Now you can waste hours of your life reading new documents on the National Security Agency's "What's New" page which should really be titled "What's Newly Declassified"....

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/whats_new/index.shtml

In particular, a paper written in 1991 called "Out of Control" spells out the vulnerability that comes from having classified material on systems with a systems administrator(s) with access to everything.

The specific conclusion was that systems administrators would become the targets of HUMINT operations by foreign intelligence services looking for root passwords.  The sysadmin could become the new "lonely cipher clerk" that is compromised by the beautiful foreign agent as seen during the cold war.

But first I must see your root password.

Would our loyal sysadmins be vulnerable to this insidious attack by attractive secret agents?  I think the answer is clearly "yes, they would".   An obvious countermeasure is to make sure that systems administrators are very good looking, well-adjusted and with healthy romantic lives. Presumably arranging a healthy romance for our sysadmins will become a standard part of counterintelligence in our nation's defense infrastructure or be a prerequisite for assignment to this sensitive position.

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_quarterly/Out_of_Control.pdf

The seductive femme fatale is Honor Blackman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_Blackman

Reality vs Visual Effects: The Case of the F-15 Over Afghanistan

I regularly stumble across pictures from the real world that look fake to me.   I believe that if this picture was used in a movie, that is if there was a scene that looked like this, people would complain about the bad and obviously fake visual effects.

Here is a picture of a fighter being refueled at night over Afghanistan.

Examine the picture (click on it to enlarge it) and then read my notes below.   These are the notes that I would give the technical director of the shot to help him or her understand what some of the problems are.

An F-15E Strike Eagle from the 391st Expeditionary Fighter Squadron at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, refuels Dec. 12 during a combat mission. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon)

1. The camera seems to be in an improbable position.  But it isn't, this is a camera on the refueling aircraft, completely normal.

2. The background (terrain) looks overly simple, it needs more detail.   That's how a lot of Afghanistan looks in winter at night.

3. The motion blur looks wrong.   But it isn't, the background is blurred because we are travelling fast over the ground, the airplane is not blurred because it has matched our speed.  The camera is at an oblique angle and the ground closer to the bottom of the picture is travelling "faster", e.g. more screen distance vertically, than the terrain in the upper part of the picture, hence the motion blur in the bottom of the picture is visibly more than the blur near the top, and this is correct.

4. You can see inside the cockpit.  That is correct, very high visibility these cockpits. And lots of illumination from the refueling boom.

5. The fighter itself is too low detail.  It looks like a model.   But it isn't.  F15s look like that from this point of view.  If you got up close you would see more detail, but it is deliberately supposed to be a sortof even grey from a distance (its a form of camouflage).

6. There appears to be a matte line around the front of the aircraft.   Yes there does appear to be a matte line, but it isn't.  It is the dark sky reflecting in the metal of the nose as it curves down.   It just looks like it has been outlined.

7. The lighting looks weird.   Its not your imagination, the lighting is weird.  We have a refueling boom with some sort of really bright (sodium?) light on it, a very bright moon illuminating everything with a blue-white light, reflections from the moon off the ground, illumination inside the fighter.  This is weird lighting.   That's just the way it is, or was, that night over Afghanistan.

In fact, it is a picture of a fighter at night over Afghanistan in winter being refueled.  It looks like that.   I think this is very amusing.

The original picture is at
http://www.strategypage.com/military_photos/military_photos_20121106215639.aspx

The Mystery of the Original Star Wars Trailer

This is a post about the mystery of the first or original Star Wars (1977) trailer. I saw this trailer about a year before the movie came out, then never saw it again. All the billions of people I knew who worked on the later films at ILM and Lucasarts never saw this trailer. I think I have found it on Youtube, but first I want to explain what it was.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, a low budget science fiction film with the odd name of "Star Wars" was being made. Its director had made a successful film in a completely different genre, but this was not the same, and very few people knew what to make of it. Generally the people who read the script and the people who were working on it did not think it would do very well.

But a number of things happened that changed that.

One of those things is something that was very unusual back in 1976 but is common today: the premarketing of the film at various fan conventions, such as science fiction conventions or ComicCon. A friend of George Lucas from Film School, whose name is Charlie Lippincott I believe, went to science fiction conventions around the country: Worldcon, Westercon, etc and gave a presentation and showed footage from the film on 16 mm.

Back then, people had never seen anything like this. We had been fed garbage from the studios like Logan's Run (1976) and otherwise treated with contempt.

I happened to be at the 1976 Westercon by LAX that year and I saw the presentation. We made him show the trailer twice and this is what I recall.

1. There was no John Williams music. The score for the film had not been composed yet, so they used a basic tone repeated to give some suspense, 2. There was a voice over saying things like "the story of a boy, a girl and a universe" and "coming to your galaxy this summer". 3. There was a shot of a little robot falling on its face (this was R2D2 and this shot was not in the final movie), 4. There was a shot of some strange older guy with a glowing sword in a bar, 5. There was a shot of a spaceship being attacked by smaller spaceships, the camera POV was moving as if it was in one of those smaller spaceships, 6. There was a shot of two people jumping over a chasm with a rope in classic swashbuckler style.

R2D2 is starting to fall.

Bang!

We thought it was great and we all went to see the movie the day it opened. That plus the Time Magazine feature on the film generated enough business so that lines wrapped around the block at the 50 theaters in the 50 cities that the film opened in.   The publicity and word of mouth of that first weekend / week of business started the snowball rolling.

No big deal, nothing strange here, except that this hugely successful film, with all the paraphenalia and media and all my friends working at ILM and no one ever saw that trailer again. No one. None of my friends at ILM or anywhere else had ever seen this trailer. It was easy to tell. You would ask if the trailer had John Williams music and the answer was always yes. This trailer had completely disappeared.

Today, I came across a very bad quality dub of something that claims to be an original Star Wars trailer.

It might very well be. It has the elements that I recall, and it has things I do not recall. But this was a long time ago, so I am going to say that this might have been the trailer, or something very close to it. Now was it worth the wait? I am not sure, it is hard, very hard to put yourself back 30+ years and remember what you were like and what the world was like.

But if this is the trailer I remembered, then the mystery is explained.  It is filled with shots that never made it into the final film as well as what I think are early visual effects tests that also never made it into the film.

Here is the trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gvqpFbRKtQ

Visual Effects Stoops to New Low to Visualize Skydiving Cats

I want to thank Yayoi Wakabayashi for pointing out one of the truly, genuinely stupid use of visual effects in recent history: skydiving cats.  Guess what, they didn't actually throw cats out a window, they used the magic of visual effects to execute this abomination.

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2012/11/16/tsr-moos-skydiving-cats-controversy.cnn#/video/us/2012/11/16/tsr-moos-skydiving-cats-controversy.cnn

With great power comes great responsibility and clearly these people are not up to using visual effects responsibly.

Visualization and Employment in the Defense and Intelligence Field

Just for fun, and because the grass is always greener, I decided to look at the job openings at a major computer technology defense contractor: SAIC. SAIC used to be a small (e.g. maybe 500 people) company in San Diego renowned for treating its people well and doing cool things for three-letter agencies that they could not talk about. I knew that they had grown since then, and I knew that the national security business was experiencing major growth, but I was still surprised.  Amazed actually.

SAIC now has over 40,000 employees, all over the country and the world. They have over 3,500 current job openings, and all of the ones I looked at had been listed in the last 60 days.  So SAIC is gigantic and is growing like mad.  

Job titles on Internet employment lists vary from useful to useless as we all know.  Nevertheless, I am an expert reader of such things and scanned about 1/2 of the jobs open at SAIC, pulling out 1 or 2 a page for further review.   The first thing that pops right out at you and waves their arms around so you can't miss it is that almost all these jobs require a security clearance.  Not merely that you are willing to get a security clearance, no, they require that you have it already, active, in order to apply.  Of the 30 or 40 jobs I happened to pick because they sounded interesting or possibly relevant all but 1 or 2 required an active security clearance.   Since you as an individual can not keep a security clearance active easily, this means that you were either in the military, working for a defense contractor or you were your own defense contractor and needed a security clearance within the last (approximately) two years (it varies, based on the type of security clearance), or it would have lapsed automatically.

But this gets better.  It isn't just any security clearance that you are supposed to have, its a Top Secret / SCI clearance.  Whats funny about that is that Top Secret is a classification, but SCI is not, its something else, an "access ticket" I think.   Just because you have a ticket to one compartment, doesn't mean that you can automatically have a ticket to another, it means you have a need-to-know for that first compartment.  I presume that it is easier to clear someone for a new compartment if they have had a ticket to another one in the past.  I guess.

So of the 30 or 40 jobs I read beyond the job title, all but a few required a clearance of some sort, and most of them TS/SCI.   One of the few that did not require this was, ironically, the one job I found that looked like it might use Visualization as part of its job description.     This is yet more (anecdotal) evidence that graphics and visualization is a poorly regarded niche specialization outside of a few industries.

Wikipedia page on security clearances
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_clearance

Ivan Sutherland, the Screen Transformation and You

[Tom Duff pointed out to me that the MIT TX-2 and the MIT Whirlwind computer were not the same thing.  Whirlwind was used on SAGE (the semi-automatic ground environment), and it was the TX-2 computer that Dr. Sutherland used for Sketchpad.   I had not been aware of how closely the TX-2 resembled or was a model for the original DEC PDP-1.   Thank you Tom!]

Ivan Sutherland has won the Kyoto prize.   

Dr. Sutherland is known for many things, but perhaps the single thing that he did that is used billions of times a second is the method of creating a screen transformation from a 3D object by applying a 4x4 matrix transformation to the 3D coordinates. Most of the time when you are seeing a computer graphics image on a screen you are seeing an application of Ivan's work.  A matrix transformation like this is particularly amenable for implementation in hardware (just about anything can be implemented in hardware, it is true, but this is perhaps the most amenable to hardware implementation of the various algorithms one can use to create a screen transformation in a scalable way).

My favorite thing that he did is a user interface for a CAD design system he did as a graduate student at MIT on a TX-2 computer. The interface is better than 98% of all user interfaces you have the misfortune of using and it was written in machine code on a crazy primitive computer.  A friend at RAND has or had a 16 mm film.  I will try and see if I can not find it on the internet, or get it transferred and uploaded to the internet.  You will be amazed.

A picture of the Whirlwind is kept here because it is so cool looking.

I believe these are Selectron tubes.  A colleague of mine at RAND had one of these or something similar from the Johniac that we had at RAND long before I got there.   Again, this is related to the Whirlwind.

The TX-2 console used for early human-computer interface work

The TX-2 at Lincoln Laboratories

Read about the Kyoto prize, the Whirlwind and Ivan below.

The Kyoto Prize

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Prize

The Whirlwind Computer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlwind_(computer)

Ivan Sutherland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Sutherland

Tom Duff also sent the following two links.  The first is a collection of information about the TX-2, including Dr. Sutherland;s Sketchpad paper.  The second has information about the Whirlwind computer.

http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/mit/tx-2/

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/mit/whirlwind/R-series/R-127_Whirlwind_I_Computer_Block_Diagrams_Volume_1_Sep47.pdf

Some Modest Suggestions in Light of the Disney Acquisition of ILM

I have hesitated to comment on the Lucasarts / ILM acquisition and what it may imply for the future of ILM because, oddly, I did not want to annoy people. Besides, how would I know, or what would I know that could possibly contribute? Other than the history of the field, and the history of various studios when it comes to visual effects facilities and how the studios think about such things, that is.

In a future post I will review some of the structural reasons why it is so hard to have a facility like ILM at a studio like Disney, but first, I am going to review some ideas that may be useful. I am pretty sure that my friends at ILM know these already, but there are others who are interested who may not. And it doesn't hurt to discuss these things a little bit, as far as I know.

Suggestion #1. Do not lose money.

Of course it is better to make a lot of money, but if you do not lose money then you are not obviously a perceived drag on the profits of the company. Its more complicated than that, a lot more complicated, but making a dollar is a much better position to be in than losing a dollar. But whatever you do, do not lose a million dollars on some project and expect them to want to pick it up.

Suggestion #2. Be low maintenance.

Manage yourself so well, that keeping you around seems effortless to Disney management. No big horrible scandals, no personnel disputes that become newsworthy, only positive modest press releases that help you get more work but does not interfere with anything that Disney is doing. Fly low, avoid enemy fighters. Avoid controversy.

Suggestion #3. Find a way to deal with Disney producers.

The standard problem in this situation is that a company like Disney Studios which makes movies, will encourage their producers to use an in-house facility, which ILM now is. But the producers are interested in saving money, and will want ILM to give them a deal. This always happens, that is the good side of the situation. The bad side is what happens when people don't love each other anymore, when they do not like the deal, when they do not like being charged for adding a billion shots at the last minute, when they do not like being charged because they went to the lowest bidder they could find then call on ILM to save their stupid ass at the last minute. Then people get unhappy and they take their unhappiness out on ILM.  You see, the producers have access to the top management at Disney and they are not shy about complaining about being charged for the work.

Suggestion #4. Find a way to deal with the fact that you work with the competition.

ILM makes its money by doing excellent visual effects as a work-for-hire production service facility for a fee.  The point is, ILM does work for whatever studio is willing to hire them. But the Walt Disney Company competes with these other studios and they may have a film coming out that competes with a film you worked on for another studio, and the producers and executives at Disney may not like that. I have no idea what you do about this situation, it is not reasonable to expect the producers at Disney to be mature on this topic. I suppose that one thing you can do is to be low profile and not try to get the normal publicity that a successful visual effects film often generates.

I predict that if you are able to do these things, that you will be able to continue the remarkable track record that ILM has generated thus far. There are major institutional reasons why a company like Disney does not normally have a facility like ILM as part of their company and those reasons are all still operative (the subject of a later post). But I am hopeful that you can find a path through this jungle and that the (somewhat obvious) ideas above may be of modest use.

A Very Brief Introduction to Robert Abel & Associates

Tomorrow is the Robert Abel event at the UCLA school of Theatre & Film, which I may or may not be able to attend. I have taken this occassion to write up a very brief introduction to the period that Robert Abel & Associates was a part of. I could write many, many pages about Abel's but I am not going to do that here. Here I am just going to do a page or so of very basic background.

Robert Abel & Associates (Abel's) was a famous visual effects production company mostly in the world of advertising and commercial production, but not entirely. It employed some of the most accomplished people in the field of visual effects and has alumni who are very important in the field as it is today.

I was there only briefly, from 1980 to 1983 or so, working on building what we called the "raster" computer animation system. What we call computer animation today is what we would have called "raster" back then, in contrast to vector animation, and other forms.

It is going to be hard for someone who only knows the field today, or of the last decade, to relate to what Abel's was and what it did. Here is some background to try and make some of it comprehensible.

1. The community of people was small, much smaller than it is today. Maybe a couple of hundred people, although maybe its a few more depending on how you define this community (e.g. visual effects, effects animation, matte painting, rotoscope, camera, etc).

2. The production companies that did exist varied in size from 1 - 80 people, and occasionally would grow larger when they had a project that could support it.

3. The companies were production companies, financed through the personal wealth of the founders, and living on a week to week basis depending on what jobs were in house. If there was no work, everyone would be laid off immediately.

4. There was occasional motion picture work, but not much and not continuously (e.g. motion picture work was nice to have but if you wanted to keep people employed you had to do other things). There was also some television work and intermittent theme park / special venue projects.

5. But at the end of the day, if you wanted to pay the rent, people in visual effects and other related fields often did commercials and such things as "broadcast graphics".

6. The two 800 lb gorilla's in the field of visual effects and graphics oriented advertising was R/Greenberg in NYC and Robert Abel & Associates in Hollywood. If you worked in this field in NYC, then you are likely to have worked at R/Greenberg. And if you had done visual effects in one form or another in Los Angeles, you were likely to have worked at Robert Abel & Associates, even if only briefly.

7. Abel's and R/Greenberg would compete for the big, technical advertising projects. Not the cute projects that had a lot of live action, more like Cliff Robertson AT&T commercials.

8. The advertising business is director driven, and at Abel's, in general, the art director was the director in charge.

9. Generally speaking, the projects themselves were done, e.g. accomplished by the "technical director" who was the filmmaker, if you will, for the project, as directed by the art director.

10. Computers were only a tiny part of the techniques used in visual effects. And perhaps the least important of the techniques.

The good news is that there were some extraordinarily talented people who worked there, and did some of their best work. The bad news was that Abel's, as a culture, encouraged people to work to their detriment and damage their health and in some cases their lives.

I will always be grateful for meeting some of the people I met at Abel's, but I would not want to work under such circumstances, if I could avoid it, again.   It was the Abel experience that first made me realize that the workplace needed to be regulated or in some way moderated to prevent the kinds of abuse I saw there and elsewhere.

What the Bin Laden Family Taught Me About the Nature of Friendship

A few years ago I was discussing with a therapist why I felt so sad and abandoned by my friends. I used as an example a story from a book about the Bin Laden family by Steven Coll.

There are a number of things to learn from this book, which is very entertaining and worth reading (see link below) but perhaps the most compelling thing I learned was something about the true nature of friendship.

As background, before we get to the specific story, here are a few other things to know about the Bin Laden family. First, they are not Saudi Arabians, nor are they related to one of the important families from Saudi Arabia. They are Yemeni immigrants who went to Saudi Arabia and fit the stereotype of the classic Yemeni immigrant in Saudi Arabia: the hard-working, dirt-poor immigrant brothers who through pluck and hard work become millionaires. The next thing to know is that there are hundreds of Bin Ladens, they take many wives, divorce them, but keep them around, and marry new ones and have children by all of them. (1) The next thing to know is that of those hundreds of Bin Ladens, most of them seem to love America and spend a lot of time here. And finally, although the Bin Laden family was and is very wealthy, there was nothing like the wealth that would have permitted a 3rd generation Bin Laden such as Osama, who was not much involved in the family business, to have anything like the $180M in personal wealth that was reported in the American news media (in other words, our press got it wrong, again, not even close to accurate.)

Some of the Bin Laden Family in Europe probably in the 1970s.

Their are many colorful anecdotes, including the one about how after 911, the Bin Ladens chartered a jet and become one of the very few planes allowed to fly, as they picked up their various relatives at various parts of the country and flew them to Europe. Recall that air traffic was prohibited for three days after 911 with only a few exceptions. It seemed safest to the Bin Ladens, our State Department, and the Saudi Arabian government to just get the rest of the Bin Laden's out of the way for a while than to have them scattered all over the country and have to provide security for them (or fail to provide security for them as the case may be).

The specific story which is significant for this post and the cause of so much emotional unhappiness is the story of the time one of the Bin Laden's of the second generation was living in Florida and planning a party in Pakistan. Recall this is before 911, before the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan was and may still be a favorite vacation place for people from Saudi Arabia, famous for its falcon hunting. Anyway, this Bin Laden was also a fan of ultralight airplanes and planned to charter a jet to fly to Pakistan taking with him many friends and ultralights for the event. Being a colorful and generous man, he also invited along many of his neighbors from Florida including his local ultralight dealer.

This is a typical ultralight without either a Bin Laden or a suitcase filled with cash.

Now we get to the signifcant part of this story. This is the part that really made me wonder what kind of friends I had and about the true nature of friendship.

You see, this Bin Laden, being a careful and generous host, also brought along a briefcase stuffed with cash in order to pay for any little extras along the way. Not a lot of money, just about $250K in various denominations, which is enough to buy a Range Rover or two, or hire a band at the last minute, or rent another floor of the hotel, take the gals shopping, whatever. The point is, he so trusted his friend with the ultralight dealership that he was given the briefcase and asked to carry it around.

Obviously, this is an indication that Bin Laden had both trust and confidence in the ultralight dealer. You can't just leave the briefcase with anyone, and you can't just put it in a safe, because you need it around if you need anything. So you appoint someone to keep it with them, someone you like and trust with the money.

 This photograph is for educational purposes only.

This really made me think. Whats the matter with me that I never get invited on the chartered jet to fly ultralights in a foreign country?  Why don't my friends let me carry the briefcase stuffed with cash? Why am I never invited to join the various Academy committees that have my friends and peers as members and who later win important awards because they served on those committees? Whats the matter with me that my friends treat me like shit?

The bottom line is that if they really liked me, they would let me carry the briefcase stuffed with cash from time to time, but they don't.

That's why this story makes me feel very sad and depressed.

_____________________________________________

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steven Coll

http://www.amazon.com/The-Bin-Ladens-Arabian-American/dp/1594201641

1.  There is a restriction in Islam that says you can only have four wives at a time and then only if you can afford them. However, there is no restriction on marrying, then divorcing, and keeping good relations with your ex-wives. In this way, one can with persistance and good financial means, extend the number of wives that you have in some long-term sense of the word indefinitely and the Bin Ladens seem to have in general used this technique.